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You throw your fists in the air. You scream. You turn to the person you came with, and you give them a big, hard, two-handed double high-ten. You pump your fists back in the air. You scream the whole time. You point at the replay and laugh with joy ...

And then, it's not uncommon, you turn around, facing the people sitting behind -- total freaking strangers! -- and you high-five that guy. And his friend. And that girl, too. 

If you've ever had a fantastic moment at sporting event, it's something like that. This is the reality when you love and love and love a team so much and then that guy makes that great play and now it's clear you're going to win that playoff game.

Oh, it is sweet.

I spent all day at the fabulous and intricate MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. Too much to blog about, including some fascinating new evidence that does a convincing job disproving the notion that, at least among a cleverly selected subset of top NBA shooters, there is such a thing at a hot hand.

But for now, in this short time, let me second Bill Simmons, who was convincing in one of today's early panels that a major problem facing sports is how expensive everything is.

The people on the panel who spoke for teams said, essentially, that they are sensitive to prices.  Day by day, hour by hour. If prices are too high, and tickets are not selling, they come up with discounts or packages or promotions or whatever else.

But this is an analytics conference. And there's a new metric I want someone to track.

That scene I described above -- how common is that? I'd like to know how many times per game, on average, a typical fan will high-five a complete stranger. If that number is as high as ever, I'm happy.

If, as I suspect, that number is down a little in the last decade or so. then I have an idea why: Thanks to ticket prices, a good chunk of the audience is not there for basketball. People are taking clients out to show them a good time.

(Brian Burke, the hilarious and masterfully blunt president and GM of the Maple Leafs explains why sports are the best place to entertain clients: "You can take them to the opera, but you can't talk," he says. "And by the way, they'll hate it anyway.")

Then there are people who kind of like the team, but have the corporate tickets for one night. 

Then there are rich people who are on dates.

What's sparse, it seems to me, in NBA arenas these days are not people, so much as fans. Like, regular people with regular jobs who loooooove basketball. People who will not hesitate to high-five strangers out of mutual love for a timely reverse layup.

If you go to an NBA game soon, look who is sitting behind you. Are they ready to slap palms with you? I think the odds are lower than they have been. (And here's where football kills. With just ten home games, regular people can afford to get in and celebrate with each other.)

I'm somebody who has dedicated a good chunk of his working life to basketball, more or less as a way to honor great fan experiences of my fairly normal American childhood. I slapped hands with strangers. 

20 years from now, what's the effect on the NBA of the regular people who have been priced out of that experience, and are playing video games instead?

Let's start tracking those high-fives among strangers, and in a couple of decades we'll see.