‘Dewey Defeats Dallas!’ Miami Herald mistakenly runs ad proclaiming Heat NBA championship

A day after LeBron James and the Miami Heat lost in the NBA Finals to the Dallas Mavericks, the Miami Herald added some inadvertent salt to South Beach hoops fans' wounds, running a Macy's ad that congratulates the Heat on its non-existent 2011 title.

The nearly full page ad--which ran on page 11D of Monday's newspaper under the headline "DALLAS WINS BEST OF 7 SERIES 4-2"--boasts the store's official Adidas merchandise commemorating the Heat's win. A representative for the Herald told Poynter it is investigating how the ad slipped into the paper.

"It's common for print publications to have two display ads ready to go in championship events," Jeff Schultz wrote in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "But what makes this mistake unusual is the Heat trailed the NBA finals three games to two going into Sunday night's game and were not yet in a position to win the best-of-seven series. Only Dallas could clinch the title Sunday night—and did."

It's not the first time Macy's has been involved in a championship-level flub. Last year, the department-store chain ran a nearly identical ad in the Los Angeles Times boasting merchandise commemorating the Lakers 2010 title. The problem? The t-shirts misspelled Los Angeles as "Los Angleles."

J.C. Penney botched its 2010 Lakers title ad in the Times, too, offering replica Boston Celtics 2010 NBA Champion trophies with every t-shirt order--even though the Celtics lost the championship to the Lakers that year, and the L.A. Times demographic is far from overrun with Celtics fans in any event.

Why NBA championships in particular inspire these copy-edit flubs is not clear, but one thing is certain: Those "Raise Another Banner" 2011 Heat Champion t-shirts will look great on the children of Uganda once their hapless manufacturers dump them overseas.

(Photo of ad via Miami New Times)

Other popular Yahoo! News stories:

• Conan O'Brien delivers graduation speech at Dartmouth: Don't fear failure, but prepare for disappointment
• Vocational education advocates battle 'enormous' prejudices
• White House calls Weiner scandal a distraction but won't say if he should resign