This was the way it was. You get up in the morning, eyes still half-shut, boil the water, reach blindly for the canister in the cabinet above the stove and pour the stuff into the cup of boiling water. What you have done is pour flour into the water instead of coffee. Eccch!
"Well, we do have quickness, I'll say that," said Jack Ramsay. "We are quick."
Does that explain anything? Does that explain why, after 16 consecutive years of putting two socks on your feet that are one and the same color, this time you leave the house with one sock white and one turquiose? What can explain what the Portland Trail Blazers did to the Celtics Friday night or, more like it, what the Celtics did to themselves?
"Mychal Thompson plays very well against Kevin McHale," Dr. Jack goes on, analyzing the phenomenon. "I don't know if it goes back to their days at Minnesota or not, but Mychal usually does very well against Kevin."
The car needs gas on the morning trip to work. Oil, too, you remember, so you reach into the self-service rack for one of those white containers and you pour the fluid into the engine. What you have done is pour automatic transmission fluid into the crankcase. You want to go back home and start the day all over.
"Kevin McHale is very physical," Mychal Thompson says, first joking about it. "We played together so much (at Minnesota) that we know we have to either outmaneuver or outthink each other. I usually come out on top because Kevin never went to class."
Your friends at the office are like that. They try to joke with you when you walk into work with a thick, bulky game of Trivial Pursuit under your arm instead of a thick, bulky briefcase. You want to grab the hands of the clock with both arms, wind them back, back to when you were under the covers and none of this was happening.
"The last game we played, down there in the Omni (against the Hawks), we looked like a bad high school team," said Thompson, now serious, now trying to explain how this happened. "Losing is tough, you know, but looking terrible when you lose, that's doubly tough."
The Celtics had won nine straight, a similiar nine straight at home, and the only two losses were one in OT and another on a Clark Kellogg shot at buzzer, both losses on the road. Portland? The Trail Blazers had lost three in a row, lost top scorer Kiki Vandeweghe, lost their way. So this?
"Well, you know, the Celtics are human and people tend to forget that," continued Thompson. "They're going to have off nights, but they're so good they're not going to have as many off nights as other teams."
But you were on as much as they were off.
"I don't want to say that," said Thompson, " 'cuz we've got to play them again. My few rules in life are these: You don't cheat on the IRS; you don't curse the Lord, and you don't get Larry Bird mad. So let's just say they had a flat night."
The Celtics' passes all seemed just a bit off, just as that spaghetti sauce on your shirt from lunch happens to be just a bit off center, where your tie might hide the spot; the Celtics shots were off and forced, oft-forced, just as you shouldn't have forced that report into the top drawer in your desk. Of course, now the drawer can't open. Yeeek!
"It was a situation where we really needed a win," said Portland's Clyde Drexler. "What it was was sheer determination; what we were thinking was that we had to be quicker than Boston because they're so big, so huge. We had to outquick them or we lose."
You leave work in the evening and your car has been hit in the parking lot. You do not know who has hit you. You reach home, you open the mail, and you have a bill from the company that has pumped out your cellar. You can't remember when your cellar ever was flooded.
Just who is Steve Colter anyway? And how about Jerome Kersey? Mychal Thompson can talk about taking away Kevin McHale's jumper and making the Celtic dribble and Clyde Drexler can talk about outquicking the Boston forwards but Kersey of Longwood College and Colter of New Mexico State, averaging 10 points between them, the two scoring 44 this game. Whaaaaat?
"Both of us played very well," said Colter. "Jerome played Larry Bird a lot of the night, and to neutralize someone like Bird, you've got to make him play some defense, and I'm not saying Larry can't play defense, because he can. But the way Jerome was running up and down the court, that will get anyone tired."
And you are very tired. So you crawl under the blankets but - ugghh! ugggh! ugggh! - there are no sheets. You just remembered you forgot to take them out of the dryer, where you left them in the morning. You want to cross this day off your calendar, even more you want to blow it away. So you take out your trusty bazooka from under your sheetless bed, aim it at the first Friday of December and fire away.
The Celtics lost their home game to Portland by 18 points and looked worse than that margin. A long regular season and a few more nights like these, a few more humble nights, still await Boston. It is not time yet to bring on the Lakers.
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