Bob Ryan

"When the schedule would come out each year," Magic Johnson once told me, "I'd grab it and circle the Boston games. To me, it was The Two and the other 80."

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You know it's a big game when Bob Ryan breaks out the ball point.

As usual, the senior Celtics writer begins the day with a perfectly appropriate quote. The practice of circling games at the beginning of the season was one followed by Larry Bird, too, at least through the mid-1980s.

As Ryan notes, no games were circled at the beginning of this season. Nonetheless, Ali-Frazier III definitely had that type of feel about it, as the below quotes demonstrate.