The outrageousness of the stretch of good basketball was told by the dialogue on the Boston Celtics bench at the end of the third quarter. Kevin McHale only had an idea the good basketball had been pretty good. Dennis Johnson had the numbers.
"Do you know we held 'em to six points in the quarter?" the Celtics guard asked the Celtics forward.
"Oh my God," Kevin McHale said.
"Do you know we outscored 'em, 36-6, in the quarter?"
"Oh my God."
"Do you know we scored the final 24 points of the quarter?"
"Oh my God!"
The numbers stood out in the mind, lined in a neon red and flashing to beat the band. Who had ever seen anything like this? Who had ever been involved in something like this? This was basketball from another planet.
There might have been more meaningful quarters played by Boston Celtics teams in putting all those flags across the Garden ceiling than the third quarter of this team's 132-99 series-clinching win over the Atlanata Hawks, but has there ever been one that has been played better? Not according to the numbers. This was the best. Ever.
"You can't explain what was happening out there," center Robert Parish said. "Everything is clicking. Everyone is working together. It just doesn't get any better than this."
"It was the best quarter I've ever played in," Dennis Johnson said. "Probably the best I ever will play in."
The usual NBA music is jazz, improvisation and one-man riffs into the night. This was strictly classical stuff. This was the Boston Symphony Orchestra on its absolute best of nights, everyone playing the same familiar piece of music, everyone hitting the notes exactly as they were meant to be played, everyone at the top of his game at the same 12-minute stretch of time.
"You'll have runs, good stretches, in other games, but the run will end," Robert Parish said. "Usually, someone will make a foul shot or dunk on you or there'll be a timeout.
"That didn't happen here. This one never ended. That was the difference."
Whistle to whistle. No stopping. The Hawks could not score. The Celtics not only could score, but score easily, efficiently, the largest number of points in the shortest time span possible. This was a wave that built and built, the noise in the building growing louder with each Atlanta miss, with each Boston success. Twenty-four points in a row to end the period? There was thunder in the big room by the time the clock read 0:00 and the Celts had a 102-61 lead.
"It was just the finest exhibition of basketball I've ever seen," Hawks guard Glenn (Doc) Rivers said, seeing this up close and personal. "They would have beat the Lakers by 40 points too. They would have beaten anyone by 40 points. It was awesome."
"They just put the pedal to the gas and started moving," Atlanta forward Kevin Willis said. "They never looked back."
There was nothing the poor Hawks could do. They were nailing boards across doors and putting giant electrical-tape X's on the windows, but this was Hurricane Gloria coming at them and there wasn't enough time or stength to do enough against a wind as strong as this.
"All you can do is make substitutions and call timeouts," Hawks coach Mike Fratello said. "What else is there? The league doesn't let you make trades during the middle of a game."
Fratello called one timeout three minutes into the period. He called a second, 20-second timeout halfway through the period. He called a third timeout two minutes later. This left him with two timeouts for the fourth quarter, one of which he is required to keep under league rules.
"Why didn't you use the other timeout?" he was asked.
"The way they were going?" he said. "Why bother? What does it give you, a 30-second break or whatever? You still have to back out there."
The Hawks final basket in the peiord came with 5:31 left in the period, a give-and-go layup by Dominique Wilkins to make the score 78-61. The rest of the time simply was a Celtics dance. There was a free throw by Bird on a technical for an Atlanta zone, followed by a blind Bird pass to McHale, followed by a back-door pass from Bird to Parish, followed by . . .
Nothing was individually flashy. Look at the list of baskets that were scored and there are no little rocket moves, one-man drives to the hoop. Everything was pass and move, pass and move, the wonder ball, around and around, the easiest shot taken at the end of the most logical pass.
The prettiest of them all went from Bird in the left corner to Parish in the middle, who stopped in the middle of his drive and passed to McHale alone in front of the basket. McHale dunked. Exotic dancer Busty Hart applauded from her seat on the floor. The Garden crowd joined. Dennis Johnson even jumped high in the air in the backcourt, smiling.
"It's not like you're laughing at anyone," he said, talking about his reaction. "It's just seeing these guys, 7 feet tall, doing what they're doing. Kevin McHale, tall as he is, just moving through the lane like that. Just seeing it done."
At the end of the period, the crowd had begun its first "Beat LA" chant of the spring. McHale was discovering the numbers that were involved. The game was over. The Hawks were gone. The record was in the books -- lowest amount of points ever scored by a play-off team in one quarter.
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