Video: Bats Disrupt Brooklyn Nets Away Game in San Antonio

Mexican free-tailed bats, the most common bats in Texas, are seen leaving the Bracken Bat Cave, which lies close to San Antonio, Texas.

Texas, my home state, has always been goth as hell. Case in point: Last night, the Brooklyn Nets, playing against the Spurs in San Antonio, had to pause the game for almost three minutes because the court was invaded by bats. Spooky!

As ESPN reports, a handful of bats flocked to the court during the opening quarter. The bewildered staff tried to go at them with towels, and even a pool net-esque contraption, so as to not halt ball-playing. Alas, it took a few minutes to get the bats out of the game.

This happens more often than you might think in Texas, which, as the Texas Parks & Wildlife puts it, is the "battiest state" in the U.S. Bats tend to live in concrete structures, taking shelter underneath the likes of Austin's Ann W. Richards Congress Avenue Bridge and Texas A&M's Kyle Field, as the Texas Tribune notes. Around this time of year, Mexican free-tailed bats, the most commonly-found bats in Texas, tend to move as they migrate from caves in Mexico, where they typically spend most of the winter, back up to the Lone Star state.

It's not the first time a bat has swooped into a Spurs game, either. On (yes) Halloween night in 2009, one of the winged creatures made an appearance during a Spurs-Kings game. Manu Ginobili, a forward for San Antonio, came face-to-face with the bat, pushing it out of the way so he could keep balling. "It's just a mouse with wings," he said at the time. When you can't dunk anymore, you have to find a way to make it into the news. So that's what I did. I grabbed a bat." When bats came down into the court last night, fans started chanting "Manu, Manu, Manu!"

The Spurs won the game that fateful night in 2009, and they did last night, too, 117 to 114. Maybe the bats know something we don't?