Here is that earliest one, a loss in Game 7 of the finals to the archrival Los Angeles Lakers.
The team had about a decade of not really contending, and then in 2022, when they lost in the finals to the Golden State Warriors, I was back.
Then last year, when a repeat performance was expected of them, they went down 0-3 to the 8th seeded Miami Heat in the conference finals and were only a Jayson Tatum twisted ankle away from storming all the way back to become the first team in NBA history to erase that sort of deficit. They lost in Game 7, and here I was again.
Finally, in 2024 -- for the first time in 16 years -- I am capping off the NBA season with all smiles.
The Boston Celtics defeated the Dallas Mavericks, 106-88, in Game 5 of the NBA finals yesterday, one game after being embarrassed by 38 points when they were trying to complete the sweep in Dallas. The way it played out -- despite causing us 72 hours of anxiety and soul-searching about yet another postseason collapse -- it appears they just wanted to win it in Boston, to see the confetti falling from the ceiling of their home stadium as they were lost in a delirium of the fans' adoration and their own happy tears.
I shared those happy tears with them. Multiple times.
I'm afraid not much work got done yesterday from the hours of 10:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., Melbourne time. Oh I had my work computer within arm's reach, but I was too amped up to focus on it very much as I sat in my garage with the game projected on the wall. I answered an email here and there and tried to get back to it after it ended, but it was pretty much a lost day.
Lost in the best possible ways.
I won't go on at length about the game -- which was a ten-point differential after one quarter, a 21-point lead at halftime and never seriously contested after that -- but I will tie this post in to movies once more.
Last night, to celebrate, I watched, for only the second time, the 1996 film Celtic Pride, starring Daniel Stern, Dan Aykroyd and Damon Wayans, and directed by some guy named Tom DeCerchio. More interestingly, it was written by some guy named Judd Apatow, which I either didn't know about or had entirely forgotten.
I had reason to forget everything about Celtic Pride -- more on that in a minute -- because I had not liked the movie very much. I didn't even see it until nearly ten years after it was released, having stayed away on bad word of mouth, which I think I generally found to be justified when I finally did see it. (Though I was surprised to see that my Letterboxd ranking, given retroactively in 2012 or so, was 2.5 stars, so I obviously didn't hate it.)
I actually wanted to find a different movie to watch last night in celebration. But unlike with many other of the world's most venerable sports franchises -- your Yankees, your Lakers -- Celtic Pride is pretty much the only movie that comes up in internet searches for movies related to the Boston Celtics. Some others do come up, but they are documentaries about the team, and that really wasn't the vibe I was going for.
I was going for something that would make me laugh a little (it did), and make me experience the excitement of the NBA finals through a fictitious representation of it (which it also did), without being nervous about an outcome that was not yet decided.
Mission accomplished.
I actually had a great time watching Celtic Pride, even though -- and this is one of the details I forgot -- the Celtics do not actually win the championship in this movie. (Spoiler alert.)
I should have probably figured that, given that all the Celtics players portrayed in this movie are anonymous nobodies -- and predominantly white, an intentional joke by Apatow -- and that the player whose personal growth we are following is the Utah Jazz' Lewis Scott (Wayans), a superstar with a super bad attitude who is disliked by his teammates.
The schlubs played hilariously by Stern and Aykroyd -- a washed-up former athlete currently working as a gym teacher, and a never-was plumber -- sort of accidentally kidnap Scott in order to help their team win the NBA finals.
I think I thought this kidnapping would leave a bad taste as I was watching, or worse, would play on uncomfortable racial dynamics that we'd know better than to put on screen in 2024. Really, that's not the case. All the schlubs intend to do is get Scott so drunk that he's ineffectual in Game 7, but when they all get decisively hammered and he ends up sleeping on their coach -- actually Aykroyd's bed -- they wake up to see that they duct-taped his hands together, a last drunken impulse to capitalize on this situation they've found themselves in, which they don't remember doing.
I didn't really believe that a star athlete out partying after a big win would stop dancing with the ladies and start drinking with two schlubs who pass themselves off as Utah Jazz fans, but some things you just have to accept on face value. And where this movie goes is pretty harmless -- Aykroyd's character does have a gun, but it's some sort of antique Russian pistol that looks like it belongs in a museum. And there isn't any true violence to speak of. What's more, Scott is smart and clever and ultimately belies his reputation as a jerk through the course of the movie. The schlubs, of course, do some learning too.
As I was watching with a celebratory $25 beer -- yes, this import beer we love is $25 per can -- I jotted down lines from the movie, and other moments, that seemed either true to my lived experience as a passionate basketball fan, or to these NBA finals in particular. I'll number them just to keep them in the order of the notes I took.
1) The earliest was this quote, by Stern's wife who has announced she is divorcing him: "I can't stand seeing you in a good mood when they win and a bad mood when they lose. I won't let the Celtics run my life!"
My wife has been there. My bad moods when they lose are more like sad moods, but I think last year, the sad mood lasted for about three days. I said something ridiculous like "But life goes on," which of course it does -- and this was like two days later. Sports, man.
2) Then Stern screaming in a gymnasium full of six-year-olds as she's walking out: "I'm not ashamed to say it. I LOVE THE CELTICS!"
3) Early on I decided that the corollary to Lewis Scott in this series was Kyrie Irving, public enemy #1 in Boston. Irving -- he of anti-vaxxing, flat earth, sometimes anti-Semitic fame -- spent two tumultuous seasons in Boston and left everyone with a bad taste in their mouth after leaving as a free agent when he'd given every indication he was planning to stay. I didn't have NBA League Pass in those seasons so I didn't see it all up close, but I understand he quit on the team, and he famously later stomped on the Celtics' leprechaun at mid-court (in about 2021 I would guess). You shouldn't do that. Irving has won only one game against the Celtics since then -- Friday night's debacle -- and he is booed relentlessly each time he comes near a Celtics fan.
I can definitely see Celtics fans enacting a real-life Celtic Pride on Irving, and maybe they would have if he hadn't had a sub-par series. But like the version of Scott that matures in this film, Irving actually said all the right things in his press conferences this series, and sounded super evolved, especially by his standards, as he gave out respect to the Celtics -- and earned some from us as well.
4) Superstitions of sports fans are legendary, and that might be even more so with Boston fans. When they're sitting down in the old Boston Garden to watch Game 6, they suddenly realize they are in the wrong seats. "This is an even game, isn't it?" one says to the other. They quickly get up and exchange seats. Later, they kick out this random guy Chris McCarthy -- played by an early Darrell Hammond -- because the Celtics started losing their lead when he arrived at the game. I once watched New England Patriots games with a guy who believed if he did not sit in his seat in the bar, and if he uncrossed his fingers -- like, all his fingers -- at any point during the game, the Patriots would lose.
5) When this movie is set, the Celtics haven't won a championship in ten years -- an unusual fallow period for a franchise with the most championships in the history of the sport. (Hang on a bit longer, as it would be another 12 years before they finally did win.) Thinking themselves on the verge, they comment "This is the start of a new Celtics dynasty." That's the very thing we're saying about the current Celtics team.
6) In Games 6 and 7 in this movie, the Celtics lose big leads. This is also one of the things that dogged this year's championship team. In one regular season game, for example, they lost something like a 22-point fourth quarter game against eventual playoff opponent the Cleveland Cavaliers. Even in winning 16 of their 19 playoff games, they several times lost leads that turned easy wins into nail-biters. (They also had at least one fantastic comeback from such a deficit, in Game 3 of the eastern conference finals against the Indiana Pacers.) My current Boston sports fans and I would have died watching these two games against the Utah Jazz.
7) Larry Bird, my favorite Celtics player of all time, makes an appearance in this movie, in that bar on the night they get Lewis Scott drunk. He has a great comment about fickle sports fans, which describe one of my friends in particular: "Fans like these make me sick," he says. "You love us when we're winning and you hate us when we're losing. You guys need to learn something about loyalty! Fans like these? You can have 'em." (For the record, I pride myself on not being such a fan. The one friend I alluded to earlier in this paragraph becomes apoplectic when the opposing team goes on a 6-0 run and imagines not only that the whole world is crashing down, but that it is a result of some core incurable weakness by the players.)
8) Stern's and Aykroyd's characters live together and you can momentarily see the address on their front door at one point. It's 44, which is almost undoubtedly a reference to Danny Ainge, who wore that uniform number during his time in Boston (which included the '86 championship team, considered possibly the greatest of all time). Ainge was also the general manager of the team and built a great winner once again in 2008, though this was after the movie was made.
9) When the guys are forced to wear Jazz jerseys at Game 7 in order for Scott not turn them in to the police, they explain to the other fans around them that it is a reverse jinx. Let's just say that reverse jinx psychology gets a LOT of discussion in my Celtics-related message threads.
10) I enjoyed seeing the presence of other legends, including the great Bob Cousy, who at age 95 is still hanging around and recently made the comment that all he wanted to see was one more Celtic championship before he kicked off. The one who didn't quite make it, who serves as a commentator on Game 7 here with Marv Albert, was Bill Walton, who died a few weeks ago. The Celtics wore strips on their uniforms that read WALTON, white lettering over a black band.
11) One of the reasons the Jazz win the series is that Lewis Scott finally learns to pass to his teammates. Comparing him to a different real-life basketball player this time, that's like the Celts' Jayson Tatum, a league superstar who had been fighting the reputation of a guy who couldn't win the big game. Tatum wasn't a dominant scorer in these playoffs, with no game over 40 and fewer over 30 than he would usually have, though it should be said that he scored a huge 31 in the clinching game. But the big difference in his maturation was looking for open teammates, and it can reasonably said that his assists were one of the biggest factors in why the Celtics won the championship. (I thought they should have given him finals MVP, which would split the awards with fellow superstar Jaylen Brown, who was a deserving MVP of the conference finals. They gave both to Jaylen.)
12) There's a big moment of two players chest-bumping in this movie. One of the most iconic moments of Game 5 against Dallas was a big chest-bump between Tatum and bit player Payton Pritchard, who was brought in specifically to make a half-court shot at the halftime buzzer, which he did.
Okay that's enough Celtic pride for one day.
And now I've got enough warm and fuzzy memories to blot out all the memories of the seasons that didn't end this way.
Let the dynasty begin!
