On its face there was nothing unusually spectacular about Stephen Curry’s 52-point game last night at Memphis. He had 56 in Orlando 33 days ago, after all, and put up 60 a year ago in Atlanta. For all the references to his 54-point resumé-maker in New York 12 years ago, Curry’s best games have seemed to come south of the Mason-Dixon and east of the Mississippi. His last triple double—he went for a mere 52-10-8 in Tuesday’s win over the Grizzlies—happened three years ago in Miami, just three days after his penultimate triple-double in Charlotte.

And the spectacle of Curry’s latest attention-grabbing triumph lasted only a couple of hours; Nikola Jokic had 61-10-10 later in the evening in Denver’s Russ-tainted double-overtime loss to Minnesota, a performance outlandish enough to steer some of the shine away from yet another Curry fiftyburger. Some 40 players have scored half a hundred in a game 96 times in the last five years; Curry himself has done it nine times during that period. That’s more than any other player, so by these preposterous standards, Curry was … well, quite good but not necessarily OMG-able. It is a strange thing on the merits to be on the receiving end of merely a polite “that’s nice” after scoring 52 points on 31 shots, including going 12-for-20 from three, but Steph Curry does not get discussed on the merits. He gets discussed in relation to himself, which while meritorious enough still is a ridiculous yardstick. By those standards, this had all the feeling of, “Oh, he did that, did he? Cool.”

The promise of Curry’s magic is always based on trying to figure out at what point in a game he is going to loosen the bolts on your mandible and make it fall to your sternum in stupefaction. And when it comes in the middle of a Golden State heater like the one that has taken them from play-in hell to genuine off-brand Finals contender status, the game of guessing when Curry will turn freak is reduced to a fascinating sidebar to the greater matter of guessing when he’ll turn an important game on his own. Curry being Curry is its own reward, as it is for any great player. But Curry being Curry when it matters most is the most fun Curry of all.

So when did Curry become Turbocurry last night? All a matter of taste, as these things tend to be. Unlike the Orlando game, in which he waited until the third quarter to demystify the Magic, he vaporized the increasingly mopey Grizz almost immediately, with three middle-distance treys in two minutes halfway through his 19-point first quarter. It was all a tasting menu from there. If you prefer degree-of-difficulty Curry, there were the two 30-footers in the second quarter to get him to 32. If you lean toward Curry-Keeping-The-Fellas-Afloat, it was the 13-point third while Memphis outscored the rest of the Warriors 37-16 to tie the game at 103. And if you’re one of those whackjobs who prefer the Curry As Part Of The Greater Whole story line, there is the palate-cleansing fact that Golden State won the game late behind six Butler free throws.

That last bit would seem to undercut the Curryosity of it all somewhat, but the Warriors are 18-2 in games with Curry and Butler in the lineup together, and both players’ individual numbers have risen and broadened in tandem. They were 25-26 and tied for 10th in the Western Conference’s play-in tomb when the deal happened Feb. 5; they are in fifth today. Only the adamantium-based Oklahoma Citys have a better record since that day, and while few people imagine that the Warriors match up any better than anyone else against the Thunder, they are at the very least now ultra-interesting again, and as hard to guard as they have been since they had Kevin Durant and Klay Thompson around Steph. In the Butler Era alone, Curry has scored 56, 52, 38, 34, 32 and 30. The elemental hoot of guessing on any particular night when he’s going to go on a bender is back. So is the stranger thrill of looking back on it after the fact and thinking mostly of the last time you saw it. And when you find out it was the end of February, well, you almost start to feel a shrug coming on, and then feel lousy for having shrugged.