Maybe this latest debacle, not thoroughly unexpected to be painfully blunt, should serve as a tipping point

Make no mistake about it — the Korean curse remains alive and well. Once again, with the medal rounds within reach and history beckoning, our Philippine national men’s basketball team fell short and found their hearts shattered amid an unstoppable Korean fourth quarter onslaught.

Even with celebrated Filipino-American Jordan Clarkson alongside top PBA draft pick Christian Standhardinger and Stanley Pringle — the player no less than former national team coach Tab Baldwin referred to as the best guard in Asia — carrying the national squad, we found ourselves looking up from the flat of our backs as the Koreans whooped it up and advanced to the semifinals of the 2018 Asian Games in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Losing has become an unfortunate but familiar crescendo when it comes to engaging in this dance of death with South Korea, which has not lost to the Philippines in the quadrennial event since 1962.

For some reason, our menacing East Asia rivals always manage to shake, rattle and roll us into submission with their potent brew of speed, shooting and perpetual movement. It’s poetry in motion that has had us befuddled and bamboozled for the past 56 years.

Korea never stops and, therefore, losing to them hardly ever does (save for that blip in 2013).

And although the cast of characters changes with every passing edition from legendary Shin Dong-Pa to Hur Jae to Lee Sang-Min to Moon Tae-Jong to now, former PBA import Ricardo Ratliffe, the Koreans’ mastery of the Filipino style of play hardly ever flinches.

The bitter truth is Korea knows how to foil our every move in much the same way Batman remains the indomitable nemesis to Joker, only this time we’re playing the villain and we haven’t found our Killing Joke.

Despite playing with chips on our shoulders, facing stakes sky-high following a tight game plan built on rock-solid scouting by Ryan Gregorio, having the players fearlessly charging into battle and being led by a bona fide NBA talent, the Philippines crashed and burned as the final buzzer sounded Monday, 91-82.

We already know how it goes. We’ve seen this screenplay a million times and replayed it in our heads. It’s like watching reruns of City of Angels knowing tragedy would strike in its ending. You yell at Meg Ryan’s character Maggie to look at the damn road while she’s biking in the last act, only to see her die in her lover’s arms in the end.

We yelled at our boys to box out, to get the friggin’ rebound, to close out on Korea’s shooters, to make good passes, to take good shots, to keep on fighting and never give up.

Only to see them falter right there on our TV and YouTube screens.

Watching the Philippines play Korea was almost like an exercise in masochism. We knew it won’t end well, but we did it anyway.

This latest loss, though, this falling over the edge in a blaze of glory, will hopefully spark some changes.

Ugh, but who are we kidding, right? That’s what we say every single time anyway.

Our battle cry, puso (heart), lifted us to ecstasy when we dealt Korea a shocker half a decade ago at the FIBA Asia Championship held in Manila, but it’s clear that this approach has had diminishing returns in subsequent years.

Losing has become an unfortunate but familiar crescendo when it comes to engaging in this dance of death with South Korea.

Maybe this latest debacle, not thoroughly unexpected to be painfully blunt, should serve as a tipping point. Maybe it shall be the douse of cold water opening our eyes to stare straight into the morning’s blinding light and jolt us into the reality that heart alone won’t be enough against our age-old foes.

For us to once and for all time shatter this Korean curse — that is for us to defeat them one after the other just as they’ve methodically done to us — Philippine basketball needs to transcend its self-imposed shackles (e.g. corporate over national interests, poorly synchronized basketball calendar, innate political bickering). This must be done for heart to evolve into something greater, something stronger. Unless we’re okay with heart falling short again and again.