The Boston Celtics are the best team in the NBA. And I might need a doctor.
In my previous attempt at dissecting Boston’s unique sports anatomy — an introspective reckoning with my pinstriped demons that, to date, insist on being called the New York Yankees — two conclusions, each deserving of further academic inquiry, emerged:
- I hate the Yankees.
- It’s not me, and it’s not the Yankees.
My clinically questionable diagnosis — what I’m calling “Boston-Induced Fury at the Yankees” (B.I.F.Y.) — will certainly need to be peer-reviewed before Mass. General Hospital can start clinical trials on a treatment, though early returns show a long road for the effort to find a cure. Even more troubling is the appearance of a second condition, likely due to the yearly onset of basketball season.
Last go-around, after executing a dramatic in-season turnaround, the Celtics endured a brutal playoff gauntlet only to lose to the Golden State Warriors in six games. However, this Celtics regular season has so far been about as successful as I could ever hope for. We sit atop the NBA. Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown are playing the best basketball of their careers. But I can hardly watch.
In my sports memory, the Celtics have never been this good. I was five years old when the Celtics won their last championship in 2008. But sports memory is distinct from actual memory, as unless one is relentlessly exposed to it during their impressionable years, it is unlikely anyone under the age of seven can remember having a real attachment to a local sports team. As far as I can remember, I technically cared about the results of Boston sporting events before the age of 10, but my involvement was limited by a borderline-unconstitutional legal constraint known by modern scholars as bedtime.
I do not remember how I felt when New England won Super Bowl XXXIX or when the Celtics won the 2008 NBA Finals. Irrelevant. What matters is that I do not remember how I felt when we lost Super Bowl XLII or the 2010 NBA Finals. But I can tell you where 9-year-old me was when it hit me that the Patriots would lose Super Bowl XLVI: crying in an overly comfortable chair in my living room, unable to accept that the Patriots would have to wait until September to avenge this defeat. It was as if I was having an existential crisis, realizing for the first time in my life that the Boston sports teams could lose.
The pain of losing a championship is formative for a young fan in Boston. It activates a dormant gene of Calvinist fatalism that is present at birth. The Puritan founders of the city believed God had prenatally determined if they would go to Heaven or be damned for eternity. Each time a team falls short at the gates of glory — like the Celtics did last January — I sink into a deep spiritual depression, suddenly sure that the destinies of my beloved teams are to burn in Hell. I can only shut my eyes, cross my fingers and pray to whatever God is listening to save our souls, and to guide Tatum’s high-arcing 3-pointers into the basket.
