Celtic days are here again
THINK OF IT as a restoration.
Recall the days when the Boston Celtics would not only win one championship after another, but would be expected to win. Whether the reigning roundball heroes went by the monikers Russell, Cousy, and Havlicek or Bird, Parish, and McHale, they showed the same spirit of selfless ardor. They had been annealed in the furnace of Red Auerbach's competitive fire.
It was a flame that Auerbach nurtured on the hardscrabble streets of Brooklyn early in the last century. He taught his players that individual statistics were snares for narcissists and losers, that basketball is as much about role-playing as life in a repertory theater, and that real Celtics leave their egos in the locker with their street clothes.
While it lasted, the Auerbach era seemed to be the natural order of things. But it suddenly came to an end about two decades ago, giving way to a long interregnum that felt to local fans like a nightmare from which they would never awake. During those parched years, New Englanders with a sense of history found themselves muttering to each other various versions of Talleyrand's nostalgic remark that anyone who had not lived before the French Revolution did not know the sweetness of living.
But the glory of the ancien regime was revived Tuesday night in the building that stands where the sweltering old Garden once stood. The team that general manager Danny Ainge assembled last summer did to Kobe Bryant and the Los Angeles Lakers what the Visigoths once did to Rome.
And they did it the way Auerbach would have wanted it done. They played unselfishly. Paul Pierce, the isolated superstar of the lean years, distributed 10 assists to his teammates. Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen rose to the occasion like throwbacks to the old Celtics. And each of the role players played his role to the hilt.
Long pent-up passions emerged in the stomping, whooping, and chanting of the Garden crowd as the game clock wound down. The celebrants were purging frustrations from a skein of seasons during which Celtics fans seemed as hopeless and forlorn as Russian exiles living in Paris after 1917.
The truth is that restorations are always exalting for those being restored. No doubt Democrats across the nation are now hoping to achieve in the political realm what the Celtics have achieved on the hardwood.
But giddy Celtics fans must not forget another truth, one that was dear to the hearts of both Auerbach and Talleyrand. The coach and the statesman both understood that, to be truly satisfying, a restoration must be made to last.
