After 55 years, my 76ers season tickets aren’t just tickets — they’re how my family shares our love of the game

My father bought Philadelphia 76ers season tickets sometime around 1970. Fifty-five years later, we are giving them up.

Over those decades, almost everything changed — buildings, names on the buildings, coaches, rosters, uniforms, mascots. The Spectrum eventually gave way to its successor, the arena whose corporate name seems to rotate every few years, and someday there will be another new building entirely. Professional sports franchises have become very good at replacing their homes.

But the tickets stayed.

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My father was a basketball guy long before he ever stepped inside that arena. Growing up in Philadelphia, he played on playground courts around the city with friends, in games where reputations traveled faster than the players themselves. There were always stories about neighborhood legends and the guys who went on to play at local colleges, before a rare few eventually made it to the NBA.

Basketball was part of his identity long before it became part of mine.

I became a basketball guy, too. My earliest days with the game were at Seger Playground at 10th and Lombard, across the street from our house. From there, it turned into pickup games, leagues, and endless hours chasing a ball around any court I could find. It’s something my father and I have always shared.

After enough seasons, those seats become something like a neighborhood.

When I was very young, I didn’t even have my own seat yet. I would take turns sitting on one of my parents’ laps just a few feet from the floor. To a small kid, it felt like being dropped directly into the sport. Players I knew from basketball cards were suddenly real. Sneakers squeaked inches away. Coaches barked. Referees barked back. It felt less like entertainment and more like watching a neighborhood game that had somehow grown enormous.

Eventually, I got my own seat, and that’s when the games truly became something shared between my father and me. Even when we weren’t sitting there together, we were connected through the team — trades, draft picks, coaching changes, winning streaks, losing streaks. Mostly losing streaks.

Over the years, we saw just about everyone come through that building: Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant. But the seats came with characters beyond the players.

There was Gloria guiding fans to their rows. Crazy Irv, who spent entire games squatting courtside with his seat flipped up behind him. The Sign Guy holding up dry-erase jokes a few rows away. After enough seasons, those seats become something like a neighborhood. You recognize the people around you, even if you never exchange last names.

One of my earliest basketball memories also came in those seats — and I’m pretty sure I owe Philadelphia an apology for it. Before Game 6 of the 1980 NBA Finals, my father let us linger near the tunnel so I could see Magic Johnson up close. Like plenty of kids, I was mesmerized by him. When he came through, I reached out, and he gave me a high-five.

Later that night, Magic stepped in for the injured Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and scored 42 points to clinch the championship for the Lakers. For years, I was convinced that our high-five had something to do with it.

The NBA changed in the years that followed. The arenas got bigger. The television money exploded. The Sixers entered the strange years known as “The Process,” when hope became a long-term strategy. Whoever walked onto that court wearing a Sixers uniform was still my guy — well, almost. There was that unforgettable and cringeworthy moment when Ben Simmons passed up an open dunk.

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A couple of years ago, my wife, Ann, and I took the tickets over ourselves. The strange irony is that the very thing that makes those seats extraordinary is also what makes them impossible. They are incredible seats, just a few rows off the floor, but they are priced like luxury goods.

Still, those seats gave us something else over the years: the chance to share the experience.

Friends sat there. Family members sat there. Sometimes we gave the seats away to people — especially kids — who had never been that close to an NBA game before. Watching someone experience that view for the first time never stopped being fun. It reminded me of what it felt like when I was a kid sitting on my father’s lap.

Our daughter Lily grew up around those seats, too. Sitting there with her was its own kind of full circle.

After 50-plus years, those aren’t just tickets. They’re our seats.

I haven’t even told my father that I’m giving them up yet.

That part will be hard — not because he’ll be angry, but because those seats were always more than tickets to him, and eventually they became more than tickets to me. My father and I have always had a wonderful relationship. But when I think about the gifts he’s given me over the years, one stands above the rest: he shared those seats with me.

Besides love itself, that may have been the greatest gift he ever gave me.

Next season, when the camera sweeps across the floor near the visitors’ bench, I’ll know exactly where to look — Section 124, Row AA, seats 19 and 20.

And I hope a kid and his dad are sitting there.

Because that’s how this whole thing works. Someone brings you to the game. Someone teaches you to love it.

And if a kid and his dad are sitting there together, watching the ball bounce and the crowd rise and fall the way it always has in Philadelphia, then everything is exactly the way it should be.

Aaron Selkow is the owner and director of Chestnut Lake Camp and a lifelong Philadelphia sports fan who has been attending 76ers games since childhood.