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.