It was with a sense of wonder that a basketball fan of a certain vintage sat in the TD Banknorth Garden — or preferably just "the Garden" — to watch the Boston Celtics this season.
The green four-leaf clover was such a sharp contrast on the home whites. The parquet floor matched the sheen radiated from the sweat-soaked dome of Kevin Garnett, the former Minnesota Timberwolves star who seemed of Boston born. So perfect was the match between the NBA's most traditional franchise and quite possibly its most traditional star.
After years of futility for one of the NBA's most celebrated franchises, the building was wired, the fans roaring to every cue of a pregame video montage that expertly wove in iconic plays from the franchise's glorious history with icon-making displays by its current incarnation.
And this was for a regular-season game against the Toronto Raptors?
What will happen if the Celtics' NBA-best 66-16 record proves a prelude to their first appearance in the NBA final since 1987 and the glory days of the original Big Three — Larry Bird, Robert Parrish and Kevin McHale?
And what if that coincided with a date with the Los Angeles Lakers, enjoying their own return to the NBA's elite on the back of a better than ever Kobe Bryant and the midseason heist of Spanish all-star Pau Gasol?
The entire Garden might crumble and fall in on itself, reduced to rubble by passion. At least those caught inside would die happy.
Basketball fans everywhere else could only hope it happened after the second overtime in the seventh game.
It's been that kind of season in the NBA.
Its post-Michael Jordan lethargy bottomed out last year when the brilliant, yet anonymous, San Antonio Spurs swept the brilliant, yet flawed Cleveland Cavaliers and star LeBron James — a series that happened only in theory based on record-low television ratings.
Now the league is on fire again, fuelled by a year of star-studded trades, sparked in many ways by the Celtics' acquisition of Garnett last summer.
The Western Conference took on the urgency of the National Collegiate Athletic Association tournament after the all-star game break, so tight was the race. The final playoff spot went to the Denver Nuggets, an all-star-littered lineup that won 50 games and finished just seven games behind the No.ƒ|1 Lakers.
And while a Lakers-Celtics final would satisfy basketball purists and nostalgia buffs alike, the road to the final is paved with storylines so irresistible that fan interest should kick in early and build steadily to June.
It's hard not to look at the Eastern Conference playoff matchups and conclude that the Orlando Magic-Toronto Raptors series is the least telegenic, in the sense that it features one of the league's smaller markets and its only Canadian one. Yet it doesn't take a maestro of a producer to create interest around the matchup between the Magic's Dwight Howard and the Raptors' Chris Bosh, two of the NBA's best young big men and good friends who just happen to drop 40 points on each other when the mood strikes.
A little higher on the marquee will be James and his Cavaliers against Gilbert Arenas and the Washington Wizards. Not only does the series feature the NBA's ascendant star (James) and star blogger (Arenas's missives on NBA.com have become must reads), the club's have flouted the no trash-talk tradition so brazenly that there's enough bulletin-board material to use it as wallpaper.
In the West, there's the feel-good New Orleans Hornets, who have inspired their devastated adopted city, thanks to the transcendent play of Chris Paul, already the game's best point guard at 22. His reward for leading his team to the No.ƒ|2 seed is a date with the Dallas Mavericks, the winners of 67 games a season ago.
Even more juicy is the meeting between the defending champion Spurs and the Phoenix Suns, led by Canada's Steve Nash in a reprisal of their bloody and controversial conference semi-final of a year ago, which turned in San Antonio's favour when the Spurs' Robert Horry laid out Nash. The melee that followed resulted in suspensions to the Suns' Amare Stoudemire and Boris Diaw after they briefly left the bench.
Those suspensions, the off-season gambling scandal implicating a respected NBA referee, the long-term malaise affecting the league's premier franchises and the indifference that greeted last year's final hurt the NBA. It never seemed farther removed from the Lakers-Celtics glory or the 1980s or the Jordan-era Bulls' dominance of the 1990s.
But now the Celtics are back. The Lakers, too. The postseason, at least at this stage, seems so delicious as to have been scripted.
It's not your father's NBA, no, but it never is.
This year's model just might be better.
