The City of Seattle seemed to rebound in afternoon court proceedings at the federal courthouse in Seattle.

And that momentum climaxed at a rally put on by Save Our Sonics, a grass-roots team trying to keep the team here.

Former Sonics Xavier McDaniel and Gary Payton, shown above, spoke a the rally. Listen to GP here. And a crowd of about 1,000 showed up to show their support for keeping the team in Seattle.

"I was a little skeptical about how many people would turn out," said James Stoltz, a life-long Sonics fan from Muckilteo, who counts Shawn Kemp his favorite Sonic. "But it was better than I thought it would be. I was actually pretty surprised."

The trail continued in the afternoon with more testimony from Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels for about 40 minutes after lunch.

After Nickels the city called Virginia Anderson, former director of the city center, who turned out to be the city's best witness. Anderson explained with authority on the reasons the city pursued a revenue sharing arrangement with the Sonics to remodel KeyArena in 1994.

Anderson said the city and the Sonics shared the revenue because they both shared risk in moving forward on the project, and the city took the lion's share of the revenue because it guaranteed $74 million in construction bonds to fund the project because public funds were not available to pay for the facility.

She confirmed the Sonics made money until 2000, due to an economic downturn and more competition with SAFECO and ultimately Qwest opening. But she also said she believed sports is cyclical and the Sonics could make money again with a better product on the floor.

Responding to Sonics attorney's question that the lease agreement had turned into a lose-lose proposition for both parties, Anderson said: "The deal didn't win or lose. The revenue that was coming went down. Both parties shared in the risk, which was what the deal was supposed to do."

Take a look at more pictures from the rally below.

We're at lunch at the trial, and the City of Seattle, it seems could use a break.

Specifically, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels was grilled for about an hour by Brad Keller, lead attorney for the Sonics.

Nickels admitted that the current lease agreement between the city and the team is financially straining and a money loser. He also acknowledged the city had been working with Wally Walker as a go-between with a local, private investment group to try and coax Bennett's group to sell the group to a local ownership group, which included the strategy of getting the team to lose money by forcing them to honor the lease and stay another two years.

While Keller seemed confident and compelling in his opening statement and cross examination of Nickels, attorneys for the city seemed to stumble on themselves a couple times when attorneys for the Sonics objected to exhibits or statements.

As promised, U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman has run a tight ship, asking a member of the public to sit down when he tried to switch to a different seat, and admonishing another member of the public for coughing while Keller spoke.

About 15 Sonics fans showed up to view the trail, a much smaller number than expected. The court is about half full, with members of the media taking up the largest section of seats.

Nickels will be on the witness stand again when the trial resumes at 1:30 p.m.

We're about to get started here. Sonics chairman Clay Bennett entered the courtroom about 20 minutes ago with his legal team, and may testify today. Also scheduled to testify today is Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels.

Click here for more information on the case.

I took a couple shots from outside the courtroom before I went through security. Outside stood a few Sonics fans waiting for the lottery to start so they can attend the trial, and some media members waiting to get a shot of Bennett coming into the courtroom.

I also talked to Brian Robinson of Save Our Sonics about the case, and you can listen to that here.

I'll have an update after the morning break.