A Green wave gathering outside the Garden

June 19, 2008 10:12 AM Email| Comments (0)| Text size – +

(Mark Wilson/Globe Staff)

Staking out parade territory this morning outside the TD Banknorth Garden were Bob Messina, David Jimenez, and Marcial Quinonez.

By Andrew Ryan, Globe Staff

The Green wave on Causeway Street was already four and five deep, with anxious fans waiting outside the TD Banknorth Garden for their Celtics.
Standing along steel barriers was a sea of green T-shirts, green Starter jackets, green baseball hats, green golf shirts, and white-and-green wigs.

Cigar smoke wafted above the street, and teenagers hammed it up for television cameras, doing their best impressions of Celtic greats. "Anything is possible!" screamed one young man, mimicking Kevin Garnett.

Nine-year-old Shawn Michael Kelly of Quincy stood on his tiptoes, craning to look through the crowd for a glimpse of the man whose green jersey he was wearing: Paul Pierce. Kelly had dyed his hair Celtics green and painted a green shamrock on one cheek. The other cheek bore the number 17, a tally of Celtics NBA championships. His father, Kevin Kelly, 35, looked down at his giddy son and smiled.

"I figured he ought to see what I saw 22 years ago," said Kelly, who was 13 years old when he cheered at City Hall Plaza at the last Celtics victory rally in 1986. "He's seen plenty of other championships with the Red Sox and Patriots, but this is his first Celtics."

Subway trains heading to the route of the rolling rally were awash in more green than South Boston during the St. Patrick's Day parade. Green button-down-shirts, green hair-ties, green shorts, and green sunglasses. A young boy clutched a green marker and wrote on a poster board: KG, #5.

Three young brothers all wore their brand new green Celtics gear, with the smallest, 6-year-old Sage Hull, sporting a jersey with a number 9 on the back.

"I'm Rajon Rondo," Sage said, doing a dance in homage to the Celtics' diminutive point guard.

The Green also inundated commuter rail trains, with about two dozen people in Celtic T-shirts and jerseys dotting the platform at 7:20 a.m. at the Bradford station, the first stop inbound on the Haverhill line. They spilled onto the 7:27 train, which was already flooded with green. "It's started already," said one conductor, who declined to give her name.

By the time the train left Andover at about 7:45, passengers had to stand. At 8:13, after leaving Wakefield, the conductor announced over the intercom that the train was "fully loaded" because of parade traffic and would become an express to Malden Center. Commuters could be seen waiting at Greenwood, Melrose Highlands, Melrose Cedar Park, and Wyoming Hill, the in-between stops the train skipped.

Vivian Tran, 22, of Haverhill, a recent Suffolk graduate, boarded the train in Bradford, wearing a green T-shirt.

"I was hoping to beat the rush of everyone who was heading in ... I didn't," she said.