For one night, even as their own world and the one around them mourned the death of Kobe Bryant, they could smile again. They could find solace in the game of basketball, the game they’ve played their entire lives. They could laugh. They could joke. They could win. “For sure, it was a big momentum game for us,” Austin Rivers said. “As a team as a whole, the past two weeks, we haven’t played our best basketball. We’ve been very inconsistent in our effort. Then we come in here tonight with our two best players and our starting center not playing, I’m sure Utah came in here like, ‘This is going to be an easy win.’ And that’s just natural for any team, but we have a lot of good players on this team.”