"Rather famously, the reckless, renegade football champions at the University of Miami did an excellent job of representing the strange and wonderful city that surrounded them. Fun. Crazy. Out of control. Those teams, in the carnival of sports, even held the racial tension of the time up to a funhouse mirror. Miami, the city, and Miami, the program, were intertwined in a way that made those insane Hurricanes feel like an accurate symbol for this insane city. Years later, LeBron James came along and the Heat took our international city's superficial evolution and framed it in flashbulbs. Florescent and famous. Big and bold. A little bit "too much" but wearing that "too much" proudly, like the guy buying bottles at the club soaked in all that jewelry and cologne.

And now here come the new-look Marlins, swaggering and unlike anything we've ever seen around here. In terms of accuracy, there probably has never been a South Florida team that better represented its surrounding neighborhood — not how we'd like to think of ourselves as a city, on the days we look our best, but rather what we actually are, at our complicated core, when we wake up without the makeup. These Marlins are so very, very Miami, from the foul mouth and heavy accent with which Ozzie Guillen speaks to the federal investigation that surrounds the new stadium."