You could hear it from the Twin Cities to the Iron Range as tipoff of Game 6 neared on Thursday at Target Center, that fatalistic voice of the Minnesota Sports Fan screaming that the Timberwolves couldn’t do it.

There was no chance they were going to extend the series against the defending NBA champion Denver Nuggets in an elimination game. Those things don’t happen around here.

That mindset has been drilled into the Minnesota Sports Fan for generations. Your grandma and grandpa watched the Vikings go 0 for 4 in the Super Bowl. Your mom and dad watched the North Stars leave town. You watched the Twins lose 18 straight playoff games in a span that stretched nearly 20 years.

Not many places in the country have experienced heartbreak to the same degree. It’s become a way of life for the Minnesota Sports Fan. You’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Now, as the Timberwolves prepare for a decisive Game 7 against the Nuggets on Sunday at Ball Arena, there might be an urge to prepare for the worst. Let’s agree not to do that, OK?

It’s time for Minnesota Sports Fan to let go of the past. This version of the Timberwolves is different.

This group of players has stared down the ineptitude that preceded it and never once blinked. They have risen to occasion time and time again. That has helped to completely change the narrative of the franchise in short order.

The evidence is woven into the fabric of this season, in particular.

Initially, when the Timberwolves started out on fire, the Minnesota Sports Fan assumed it was only a matter of time before a big bucket of water doused the flames. That wasn’t the case as the Timberwolves remained in contention for the No. 1 seed in the Western Conference until the very end.

Then, when the Timberwolves hooked the Phoenix Suns in the first round, the Minnesota Sports Fan went through the mental gymnastics of convincing themselves that it was the worst possible matchup. That clearly wasn’t the case; the Timberwolves imposed their will on the Suns on their way to a stunning sweep.

Finally, when the Timberwolves got punked by the Nuggets while squandering a series lead, the Minnesota Sports Fans concluded that a funeral procession was in order. That wasn’t the case as the Timberwolves rose from the dead with a 45-point blowout win.

No longer are the Timberwolves the butt of the joke. They are a legitimate contender to win the NBA championship largely because this version of the Timberwolves is unlike any team that has come before it. There’s a toughness built into this group of players by head coach Chris Finch that allows them to push through adversity and keep going.

It starts and stops with Anthony Edwards, the future face of the league, who has endeared himself to the masses throughout the playoffs with his killer instinct on the court. He’s aided by a perfectly constructed starting lineup that includes Karl-Anthony Towns serving as a secondary scorer, Rudy Gobert controlling the paint, Jaden McDaniels holding it down on the perimeter, and Mike Conley making sure everything runs smoothly. There’s also a bench unit led by fan favorites Naz Reid and Nickeil Alexander-Walker.

The vibes have been immaculate, and even when they have taken a dip, like they did last week, the Timberwolves haven’t let things spiral out of control like they may have once upon a time.

This team has proved it’s OK to believe. It has shown the Minnesota Sports Fan that it is up for the challenge regardless of circumstance.

Why can’t that continue in Game 7?

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Minnesota United vs. Portland Timbers

When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday
Where: Allianz Field
Stream: Apple TV Season Pass
Radio: KSTP-AM 1500 ESPN
Weather: 76 degrees, sunny, 10 mph east wind
Betting line: MNUFC plus-135; draw plus-300; Portland plus-295

Form: MNUFC (6-2-3, 21 points) ran its unbeaten stretch to four straight with a 2-2 draw with Galaxy on Wednesday. Portland (3-6-4, 13 points) ended a nine-match unbeaten skid with a 4-2 win over San Jose on Wednesday. Timbers scored three goals after Earthquakes’ Bruno Wilson received a red card in the 71st minute.

Quote: “I don’t want to be in any way lulled into complacency against them because obviously they are not on a good run at all,” Loons manager Eric Ramsay said Friday. “… I want to try to look behind the table (Timbers are 11th in West) … and encourage the players to do so. They’ve got some very good players.”

Absences: Emanuel Reynoso (return-to-play protocol), Hugo Bacharach (knee) are out. Jordan Adebayo-Smith (ankle) and Moses Nyeman (tight) are presumed out. Kervin Arriaga (hamstring) did not train Friday and is questionable. Hassani Dotson (hamstring) trained Friday, but after missing three matches, it’s likely too soon for the midfielder to be involved Saturday.

Connection: Loons goalkeeper Dayne St. Clair hung out with Portland Timbers Kamal Miller and Eryk Williamson on Thursday night. St. Clair grew up and played at a youth level with Miller in Canada; St. Clair played with Williamson at the University of Maryland.

Rumor: Reynoso has been linked in a move to Mexican club Juarez this week. The Loons is exploring a potential offloading of its Designated Player to Liga MX or elsewhere this summer.

Projected XI: In a 5-2-3 formation, LW Sang Bin Jeong, CF Tani Oluwaseyi, RW Bongi Hlongewane; CM Robin Lod, CM Wil Trapp; LB Joseph Ropsales, CB Devin Padelford, CB Micky Tapias, CB Michael Boxall, CB DJ Taylor; GK Dayne St. Clair.

Player to watch: Evander. The one-named Brazilian has five goals and four primary assists this season, including a penalty kick goal, an assist and six shot-creating actions on Wednesday.

Context: Ramsay said he would look at “micro” details that went into Loons losing control of the Galaxy draw. On Friday, he was asked for an example and pointed to how MNUFC defended the goal kick that led to Riqui Puig being able to go on a long 60-yard run to set up the go-ahead goal in the 68th minute. It appeared, for one element that Robin Lod was caught on the left half-space, opening up the middle for Puig to sprint foward.

Tidbit: A large contingent of MNUFC players and staff were at Target Center for Wolves’ Game 6 win over Denver. Boxall, Lod, Oluwaseyi, Tapias and more. Ramsay was there, too. The Welshman said he has watched YouTube videos to learn some basics of the sport and was intrigued to know what coaches said during the first-quarter timeout before the Wolves’ huge run.

Prediction: The Timbers have allowed 27 goals this season — second-worst in MLS — and MNUFC will add a pair to that total. Here’s to Teemu Pukki ending his 420-minute scoring drought since early March. Minnesota wins 2-1.

By NICHOLAS RICCARDI and MARGERY BECK (Associated Press)

Marta Moehring voted the way she prefers in Nebraska’s Republican primary Tuesday — in person, at her west Omaha polling place.

She didn’t even consider taking advantage of the state’s no-excuse mail-in ballot process. In fact, she would prefer to do away with mail-in voting altogether. She’s convinced fraudulent mailed ballots cost former President Donald Trump a second term in 2020.

“I don’t trust it in general,” Moehring, 62, said. “I don’t think they’re counted correctly.”

But now Republican officials — even, sometimes, Trump — are encouraging voters such as Moehring to cast their ballots by mail. The GOP has launched an effort to, in the words of one official, “correct the narrative” on mail voting and get those who were turned off to it by Trump to reconsider for this year’s election.

The push is a striking change for a party that amplified dark rumors about mail ballots to explain away Trump’s 2020 loss, but it is also seen as a necessary course correction for an election this year that is likely to be decided by razor-thin margins in a handful of swing states.

“We have to get right on using these mail-in ballots for the people who can’t get there on Election Day,” Rep. Scott Perry, one of Trump’s strongest congressional allies in his push to overturn the 2020 election, said at a conservative gathering in his home state of Pennsylvania.

Republicans once were at least as likely as Democrats to vote by mail, but Trump changed the dynamics in 2020. He preemptively began to argue that mail balloting was bad months before voting began in the presidential race.

That alarmed GOP strategists who saw mail voting as an advantage in campaigns because it lets them “bank” unreliable votes before Election Day and lowers the risk of turnout plummeting because of bad weather or other unpredictable factors at the polls. Trump’s own campaign tried to sell Republicans on casting ballots by mail, but his voters listened to the then-president. In 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Democrats were vastly more likely to cast ballots by mail than Republicans.

The trend continued in 2022, and its costs were starkly illustrated in Arizona.

Three top-of-the-ticket Republican candidates there who echoed Trump’s lies about the unreliability of mail ballots encouraged their supporters to vote in person on Election Day. An election machine meltdown that day in one-third of the polling places in the state’s most populous county led to huge lines and some would-be voters departing in frustration.

The three top Republicans all lost, including falling 17,000 votes short in the governor’s race and 500 votes short in the one for attorney general.

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This time, Republicans say they’re not going to risk leaving ballots behind. Trump’s handpicked chair of the Republican National Committee, his daughter-in-law Lara Trump, has vowed to embrace all sorts of legal election methods to boost turnout that Trump falsely blamed for his 2020 loss, including so-called “ballot harvesting” — letting people turn in mail ballots on the behalf of other voters.

“In this election cycle, Republicans will beat Democrats at their own game, by leveraging every legal tactic at our disposal based on the rules of each state,” Lara Trump said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Turning Point Action, a prominent, pro-Trump group, is launching a $100 million campaign to reach infrequent voters in the swing states of Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin. That will include offering mail voting as one way to make casting a ballot easier, spokesman Andrew Kolvet said.

“We’d love for elections to be run the way they were before,” Kolvet said. “We can spend our time complaining about it or we can get in gear and play by the rules that Democrats, or largely Democrats, used.”

Even Trump himself has started to recommend mail voting, though he frequently bashes it during campaign events and blames it for his 2020 loss. The RNC is also continuing to file lawsuits against various aspects of mail voting around the country.

Nonetheless, Trump recorded a short video telling his supporters that “absentee voting, early voting and Election Day voting are all good options.”

One recent push to publicize mail voting came during last month’s Pennsylvania primary, when the Republican State Legislative Committee teamed up with a committee supporting the party’s Senate candidate and the state GOP. The goal, said RSLC political director Max Docksey, was “to correct the narrative among Republican voters on mail voting.”

The effort was inspired by what the RSLC saw as a successful effort to increase mail voting among Republicans in the battle for control of the Virginia Legislature in 2023, a fight ultimately won by the Democrats.

The group sent mail ballot applications to 1.5 million GOP voters, sent 475,000 text messages encouraging mail voting and touted the benefits of mail voting at party gatherings.

But at the same time, Pennsylvania Republicans have sued to force the state’s mail ballots to be counted at polling places rather than the county election offices, which have the equipment and space to do the job, That’s among many lawsuits targeting mail voting filed by Republicans around the country since 2020.

The conflicting messages could make it challenging to swiftly reverse the drop-off in mail voting among Republicans.

In Pennsylvania, Republican operatives were pleased with their effort, which they said led to them adding nearly twice as many voters to the state’s mail ballot list as Democrats did during the primary. But the overall share of Pennsylvania mail ballots sent by Republicans remained about the same as in 2020, at only one-quarter of overall ballots, according to data from the secretary of state’s office.

Bill Bretz, chairman of the Westmoreland County Republican Party in the western side of the state, said he’s noticed voters in his conservative area slowly but steadily warming up to mail voting.

“People understand the consequences of this election,” he said. “There’s a lot of buy-in to vote by any method available, and the vote-by-mail bogeyman is beginning to fade.”

Riccardi reported from Denver and Beck from Omaha, Nebraska. Associated Press writers Marc Levy in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Martha Mendoza in Santa Cruz, California, and Leah Willingham in Charleston, West Virginia, contributed to this report.

By DAVID BAUDER (AP Media Writer)

NEW YORK (AP) — The planned presidential debates between Joe Biden and Donald Trump that were swiftly organized this week are a coup for CNN and ABC News — but a virtual guarantee they’ll be among the least-watched general election contests ever.

The two campaigns skirted the Commission on Presidential Debates, which has organized the events for 36 years with the goal of getting them before as many eyes as possible.

ABC, which has assigned David Muir and Linsey Davis as moderators for a debate scheduled for Sept. 10, has said it will make it available for simulcast on any U.S. television network or streaming service that wants it. CNN had not said by early Friday whether it will do the same for its debate, set for June 27 with Jake Tapper and Dana Bash as questioners.

A debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and whomever former President Trump chooses as his running mate is expected to air this summer on CBS.

Each of the two debates between Biden and Trump in 2020 were carried on at least 16 networks, according to the Nielsen company. The first was seen by 73.1 million viewers, the second by 63 million.

Debates prior to a party’s nominating process, which Trump skipped this year, are usually organized and broadcast by individual media organizations. The tradition has been different for those organized by the commission during general election campaigns, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and member of a group of experts Annenberg organized a decade ago that explored ways to increase viewership.

“It’s the public’s debate,” Jamieson said.

For CNN leaders, there’s a great temptation to keep it for themselves. It would likely be the most-watched event ever on a network that is struggling in ratings. CNN’s chief executive, Mark Thompson, made a point in tying the debate to the brand on Wednesday when he announced the agreement to hold it during a sales presentation to advertisers in New York.

“When people have something important to say,” Thompson said, “they say it on CNN.”

CNN said Wednesday the debate would also air live on its international and Spanish-speaking networks, and stream on CNN Max and CNN.com.

The pool of people available to watch on CNN’s main television network is dwindling due to cord-cutting of cable and satellite services. CNN was available in 71% of American homes with television in May 2020; this month it’s just under 54%, Nielsen said.

Keeping the debate on CNN alone would run up against stout criticism that it’s not the public-spirited thing to do, something ABC moved quickly to avoid.

Political polarization that has spread to the media would also likely cut into viewership if the event was not shared, Jamieson said. Would Fox News viewers, after years of hearing CNN criticized by some of their favorite politicians and media figures, turn to CNN for a debate or skip it entirely?

It’s still not certain how many other networks will carry the debates even with the opportunity. Only PBS has said that it would; other networks have yet to give a public commitment.

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Some of those executives would have to swallow hard to carry another network’s personalities on their air, with the risk some of their regular viewers might like them and switch allegiances. Pressure to carry the debates for public service reasons would be intense, though.

Despite worries about how many people will watch, Jamieson said there’s some irony in that there’s a lot to like about the proposed ground rules for the event. So far, the plans are to hold them in television studios without an audience.

That’s something the Annenberg group had proposed a decade ago, saying an audience that reacts to what the candidates are saying is often a distraction, and that audience is usually packed with partisans on both sides.

If the two campaigns agree to rules where one candidate’s microphone would be shut off while his opponent answers a question, it would go a long way to solving what has been a more frequent problem recently with politicians interrupting and talking over an opponent, she said.

“If someone had told me that there was going to be some good news about political discourse this year, I would have told them they were delusional,” she said.