The Pacers were angry. Two nights earlier, they had blown a fourth-quarter lead and lost in Miami against their nemesis

The Pacers were angry. Two nights earlier, they had blown a fourth-quarter lead and lost in Miami against their nemesis. Two nights before that, they'd dropped a game at home against Detroit, which is the kind of thing that happens during the NBA season as one game blends into the next. Not to this team, however.

"Every night we're playing for home-court advantage," Indiana coach Frank Vogel told me as we walked down the hallway following his pregame media scrum, not long before his team took on the Houston Rockets in late December.

I asked Vogel if he had any worries about how his team would bounce back from that Heat loss, a crushing three-point defeat that ended with Paul George howling about an uncalled foul from LeBron James on the game's final play. George may have had a case, but he wasn't getting that whistle against LeBron. Not in King James' building, anyway. Get Miami in Bankers Life Fieldhouse in a Game 7 in front of an Indiana crowd, and who knows what might happen?

"We really feel like every night we're playing for a championship."

Vogel looked at me like I was crazy. That play was the whole point of the Pacers' season. Losing two in a row wasn't just poor form. It was a refutation of everything they wanted to stand for as a team.

"We really feel like every night we're playing for a championship," Vogel said. "A lot of teams can't say that about their regular-season nights. There's a lot of ‘Just Another Night's' in the NBA. But not with our team."

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Immediately after losing Game 7 in Miami last spring, the Pacers started talking about home-court advantage. They talked about it in Los Angeles over the summer during informal team workouts. It was the first thing they talked about publicly when they returned to Indiana for training camp. It was almost a dare.

"It's something that we feel that this group is mature enough to handle," said power forward David West, who doubles as the team's conscience. "From day one."

And so the pissed-off Pacers took the court against the Rockets in front of a raucous sellout crowd -- their seventh in 13 games -- and won by 33 points. Their defense was impenetrable and George took over in the third quarter; he also helped harass James Harden into a 3-for-14 shooting night. "It's a good feeling," George said. "Because when we're at our best, we feel like we're unstoppable."

For most of this season the Pacers have been unstoppable. They opened with a nine-game winning streak, then reeled off seven more. At the rejuvenated Bankers Life Fieldhouse, they ended 2013 with a 15-1 record and an average margin of victory of better than 14 points a game. Attendance is, quite reasonably, booming.

That last part is important. Because while it's a common complaint among the Pacers that the national attention they've earned has been woefully late in coming -- they were, for instance, not one of the 10 teams featured on Christmas Day -- they had to get their own fans back first.

"Winning back our city and our fans and our state is as much a part of our goals as winning basketball games," Vogel said. "This is a Pacers town and there was a time they cared less about the Pacers, for good reason. A lot of our goals were centered around delivering to our fans a team they could fall in love with."

After years of neglect from a basketball mad community, the Pacers are once again a beloved institution. Season ticket sales are up 34 percent from last year, the second straight season they have enjoyed a better than 30-percent rise. Over their first 16 home games, attendance has increased by more than 3,000 per game. They had already matched last season's sell-out mark with 10 before the calendar had even flipped to 2014.