Kyrie Irving drew a fascinating comparison between his time as a member of the Big 3 for the Brooklyn Nets with a person’s love past.

The former standout player at St. Patrick High School and resident of West Orange, New Jersey likened his experience with the Nets to the girl that got away.

“I don’t look at that aspect of my career as disappointing,” he said Saturday after his Dallas Mavericks lost to James Harden and the L.A. Clippers, 107-88, according to video posted by Tomer Azarly.

“I think just think it’s kind of like one of those times that got away, the girl that got away… and it’ll hurt you for the rest of your life. You’re like looking at it, you got a great bad wife, kids and all that. So I don’t second-guess it, I don’t wanna get in trouble with my wife. I’m not thinking about nobody else, baby. But it just feels like that FOMO [fear of missing out], you missed out on something great.”

In the summer of 2019, Irving and Kevin Durant signed free agency contracts with the Nets; however, Durant was sidelined for the whole campaign due to his Achilles surgery.

A year later, in the infamous Game 7 of the Eastern Conference playoffs loss to the Milwaukee Bucks, many speculated that Durant’s two-point basket would have been a three-pointer and the Nets would have advanced if he hadn’t been prone to wearing sneakers that were one size too big.

The Nets have been somewhat cursed—losing 10 straight playoff games—aside from that 2020–21 campaign.

Brooklyn is now the clear favorite to win the NBA title in 2022 after Harden forced his way out of Houston to join Durant and Irving with the Nets. However, the Nets never delivered on their promise, and Harden apparently got tired of having to deal with Irving’s inconsistent availability due to his vaccination status and other concerns, thus The Beard forced his way out again in February 2022.

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In the end, the Big 3 of Harden, Durant, and Irving played just 16 games together, posting a 13-3 record. Over the course of their careers, Kenny Atkinson, Steve Nash, and Jacque Vaughn served as Irving and Durant’s coaches.

“We could sit here and play to what-if scenarios all day, bro,” Irving said Saturday. “But for me, even when James came to Brooklyn — and a lot of my peers, and a lot of my teammates I’ve played with — I’ve always told them that ‘This is bigger than just us being teammates right now, present moment. You’ve got to do what is best for you.’

“And it’s unfortunate that me, James and KD are part of the NBA history’s ‘what ifs’ of just having a super-team, and the expectations on us. And we did have a few good seasons and outside of just the things we couldn’t control, with the vaccine stuff and the mandates in New York City, and just the ups and downs of scenarios and circumstances, I feel like we did pretty well.”

When the Nets transferred Irving to Dallas in February of last year and then dealt Durant to the Phoenix Suns in another big transaction that sent Mikal Bridges to Brooklyn, the whole thing came to a head.

Due to foot pain, Durant did not play in the Suns’ 116-113 victory over the Knicks at Madison Square Garden on Sunday. Durant returned to New York this week with the team. On Saturday at St. John’s, he did see Rick Pitino and the Red Storm from the courtside.

“In Brooklyn…it just wasn’t no consistency, no continuity on who we were as a team,” Durant told the NY Post. “And when you want to win a championship, you’ve got to build an identity from Day 1, and it was just a lot of circumstances that were out of the players’ control that got in the way of us building our continuity.

“That’s just the business of basketball. That’s just the NBA in general. But we all got better as individual players, and we learned a lot from that experience — everybody from executives to players — and we can go about our NBA experience with more knowledge now.”