“It just hit me the other night,” she tells Westword.
The last time Keeney went to a Nuggets game was three years ago, and she did so in a wheelchair. Lupus, compounded by other health issues from autoimmune diseases and chronic illnesses that she's had over the years, made it nearly impossible for her to leave the house back then.
But on Sunday, June 4, Keeney filed into Ball Arena with the rest of Nuggets nation.
“I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I walked in here. I did that,'" she says.
Before the onset of her symptoms, Keeney worked at the Denver Post as an aerospace reporter and eventually entered the aerospace industry herself. She hasn’t been able to work since 2018 because of the brain fog caused by her condition, which makes it hard to remember certain words and even details about her life — like her own address.
Keeney and her husband, Carson Pelo, moved from Denver to Rochester, New York, in 2020. That’s where her son lives and where she grew up. Colorado's poor air quality and notoriously sunny days were making Keeney’s health worse, because lupus can react badly to UV rays.
After touring an "amazing" home in Rochester in November 2019, they knew it was time for them to make the move.
“Since we've been back there, I have a full medical team with the University of Rochester, which is a phenomenal medical school,” Keeney says.
“We've changed some of my medications, tried different treatments, and it's working, which is awesome. I will never be cured. I have a lower life expectancy than someone who's healthy, but I'm able to do things now that there was no way I could do [in Denver].” That includes making the trip back to the Mike High City to watch the Nuggets vie for their first NBA championship.
Keeney has been a Nuggets fan for over a decade. In fact, the first game she attended with her husband was the infamous 2013 game where mascot Rocky passed out while being lowered from the rafters.
“I'd never been to a live game before, so I'd never seen Rocky come down from the rafters,” she recalls. “I didn't know there was anything wrong until he slumped to the floor. I'm like, is this part of the act?”
Rocky made it out all right, and Keeney has since made many more happy memories with Pelo and the Nuggets.
Laura Keeney and her husband, Carson Pelo, used to have Nuggets season tickets.
Courtesy Laura Keeney
The team has been with Keeney through some of her hardest times, she says.
In 2017, her mother was diagnosed with cancer, and the two would watch Nuggets games together in the hospital. Keeney shared some of the journey on social media, and Denver wound up reaching out and sending a care package.
“We opened it in the hospital, where she was because she wasn't doing so hot from chemo, and she was so excited,” Keeney remembers. "I explained to her that the team had done this, and she was just like, ‘They're really special people. I see why you like them now.’”
Keeney had already loved the Nuggets before the kind act, but their place in her heart only deepened after it. When her mom passed away, Keeney used some of the money she inherited to invest in Nuggets season tickets.
Before Keeney got sick, she’d been an avid concert-goer. But that wasn't possible anymore because of her symptoms. Nuggets games, however, were — and since her doctors at the time told Keeney that she only had a few years to live, she didn't want to waste the opportunity to see her team as much as she could.
“This is something that [my husband and I] can do together, because I can't get out of the house that often,” she says. “This team isn't just a sport to me. … I just remember how absolutely sick I was, both with grief from losing my mom and also then getting these terrible diagnoses.”
Basketball helped get Keeney through the health storm — giving her both joy and a way to leave the house. Even since moving to Rochester, she's kept up with the team closely through social media and loved ones who still live in Colorado.
“We do have to pay for NBA Season Ticket now so we can watch the games,” she says.
“But if you live here, you can't watch the games anyway, so I guess it's really not that different," Keeney adds, referencing the ongoing dispute between Comcast and Altitude TV, the network that airs all the Nuggets and Colorado Avalanche games in the local market.
Most fans haven’t been able to watch the teams on TV in years because of the contract disagreement, which Keeney still can’t believe is happening. She says it’s been easier for her and her husband to watch games on TV in Rochester than it is in Denver, but because New York is two hours ahead, it also keeps them up late at night.
They had an especially hard time getting enough asleep during the Nuggets' historic playoff run.
As for their favorite players, Keeney is drawn to Aaron Gordon’s “good-vibes-only” unflappability. “I really, really love AG,” she says. “He's smart. He's spiritual in the sense that he meditates. He's motivational. He's a lot of those things that I think the team really needed.”
She also adores Bruce Brown, and will happily buy him as many Rockmount Ranch Wear Western shirts as he wants to keep him around next year.
Other favorites include Christian Braun, DeAndre Jordan, Jamal Murray and Nikola Jokic, of course.
“This team — watching what they've done even in the last five, six years, it's been incredible,” she says.
There have been several times in the past when Keeney thought the Nuggets could win it all, but the team always seemed to be missing a key component.
This year, they have that little something extra.
“To see how much they've grown, how much they've come together, how they’ve worked so hard. It sounds cliché, but every time they say ‘Family on three,’ they literally are family," Keeney says.
During the entire playoff run, Keeney wished she could be in Denver. When the team made it to the finals, Pelo told her that while he couldn’t go because of work obligations, she should.
“I have the best husband in my corner,” she says.
Traveling without Pelo is tricky, since he typically helps Keeney with her heating pads, braces, backup medicines and other supplies to keep her going. Plus, she wishes she could share the experience with him.
Because she is immunocompromised, she's had to take extra safety precautions like double-masking for game two and the game three watch party at Ball Arena, both of which she attended.
The trip has exhausted Keeney, but getting to see the city embracing its team and celebrating the championship run that she’s been waiting on for years has made it all worth it.
“Looking back on it now, I just see how far I've come in terms of my own health journey,” she says. “I've been trying to not take it for granted and be really grateful about it every day, and this team is a really big part of that. Being able to be here for these three games — I don't think it's something I can put into words. It means a lot to me to be able to do this.”
