Last night Mr. Pinault and I ventured to the TD BankNorth Garden to see the Boston Celtics take on the Cleveland Cavaliers in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference semi-finals. Pictured below, that’s a burst of fireworks from the pre-game show. It sort of freaked me out. If 19,000 people had to quickly evacuate an indoor sport arena due to a haywire pyrotechnic display, exactly how many of them would be trampled to death?
Only my most grizzled readers may recall when I was a devout Celtics fan about four or five years ago. But I stopped paying attention when Danny Aigne became General Manager, and he traded all the players that I loved and annually allowed the team to fall to new levels of suckiness. Sure, a “real” fan would have kept watching, but life is too short to spend it crying over the woes of a NBA team.
This season, with the acquisition of Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen to assist veteran warhorse Paul Pierce, the Celtics’ years of re-building have finally came to fruition, and they finished the regular season with the best record in the league. Still, I never resumed my Celtics enthusiasm, unlike Mr. Pinault, who has been promising/threatening for the past few months that if the Celtics made the playoffs, we would go to a game.
Hence, last night. Oh, to be back at the Garden in the nosebleed balcony section, my stomach full of Budweiser and pre-game pizza from Ernestos in the North End, surrounded by working-class white Bostonians who have no quelms about chanting “USA! USA!” when non-American players on the other team take free throws. At least we were in a relatively quiet section, filled with pensive young men who watched the Celtics stumble and trip their way to victory with their elbows on their knees, silent except for peroidic intense hand-clapping and the occasional curse. These guys weren’t dancing around to get on the Jumbo-tron. They weren’t going to relax until victory was assured for the Celtics in the final seconds of the game.
