Being the champion of a professional sport may grant you equivalent status to the champions of the other professional sports, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it sounds as though you’ve won anything prestigious.
Take the World Series, for example. The name implies that if you win, you are literally — if not quite truthfully — the champions of the entire world. The Stanley Cup just sounds prestigious, likely because its full title is Lord Stanley’s Cup. As for the Super Bowl, it’s only the closest thing to a sports holiday the country has.
But when it comes to The Finals — well, let’s just say that people are as likely to be thinking about academic nightmares as they are basketball when they hear that.
