The Celtics are measured with their history in the NBA final

The Celtics have a date with their history this Thursday in Boston.

The thing looks regular, but the guardian of that memory, Richard Jackson, is "calm and hopeful".

Jackson has been the curator for 40 years of the city's Sports Museum, whose headquarters are in the TD Garden, the stadium where his lifelong team will meet in the sixth game of the NBA final with his glorious past and with the Golden State Warriors.

Those from San Francisco lead the tie (3-2), after winning on Monday at home and, above all, after winning the fourth game, thanks to another spectacular performance by their star, Stephen Curry, on the opposite court, when the score was 2-1 in favor of the Celtics, and they were able to take off who knows if definitely.

"He slipped through our fingers that night," says Jackson,

who trusts "in the resilience of this group".

“The good thing about this,” he consoles himself, “is that the script is never written.

I've been watching this team play since the early 1960s, and believe me, anything is possible when Boston pushes."

Jackson, a man of infectious erudition, is living proof that basketball is serious business in this distinguished corner of the East Coast.

The city has been in suspense for a couple of weeks, because too much time has passed since they reached a final: 12 years without feeling the collective tickle, that give and take of great sports evenings from one coast to another.

This is also the 75th anniversary season of the NBA.

Magic Johnson (left) and Larry Bird during a game in Los Angeles, late 1979. Associated Press

The last time the Celtics won a ring, the 17th, which made them the most successful team in the league, in a fierce tie with the Los Angeles Lakers, was in 2008, against, precisely, Pau Gasol's Lakers.

Then Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen made possible the renaissance of the local faith in basketball, which, as Michael Holley recounts in his book

, had been somewhat withered since the penultimate time, when the fifth of Larry Bird and Kevin McHale (winners also in 1981 and 1984) conquered the glory.

Those were the years of the greatest rivalry with the Lakers, and the years of the Larry Bird vs. Magic Johnson feud (East vs. West, old school vs. new show), before the great advent of one Michael Jordan. .

In Boston, fans know the Celtics' golden ages by heart, like art historians the pictorial periods of Picasso.

Before those two stages, there are the two rings of the seventies (1974 and 1976) and the time when they won nine championships in 11 years and the founding myth of basketball was forged in the city, when the coach was Red Auerbach and his biggest banner, Bill Russell, and played Frank Ramsey, Bill Sharman, Bob Cousy or Tom Heinsohn.

Jackson misses those times as one misses being young, but also for other reasons “In the sixties the NBA was a much smaller league, with more direct rivalry between the teams.

It was a modest house, not the grand mansion it is today, with those stratospheric salaries, and teams scoring 40 points in a quarter, without the benefit of 3-pointers.

The shots of three have taken an excessive role.

Before it was played from outside to inside and now it is the other way around.

Call me a traditionalist, but it's less entertaining for me to watch a game built on a series of missed shots, with teams fighting to grab offensive rebounds," he explains, before recalling, throwing back his high-capacity hard drive, that the first triple in history was scored by one of his own: “Chris Ford, in 1979″.

The Boston Celtics in the years of their absolute domination of the NBA.

Sam Jones, Jim Loscutoff, Gene Conley, Bill Russell, KC Jones, top row from left.

In the middle, Buddy Leroux, trainer Red Auerbach, Bob Cousy and Tom Heinsohn.

Bottom: Frank Ramsey and Bill Sharman. Getty Agency

Jackson fears that this new order of the game, in which the legend of his a

ñorados Celtics sounds like the old days, benefits the Warriors, who have among their ranks Curry, the best shooter from distance in history.

The key this Thursday for the locals will be, and it is not exactly a tactical secret, to neutralize it, a task to which they have been dedicated since the beginning of the final.

But that also might not be enough: the story of the Warriors' third victory in Game 5 was one of the absence of the point guard's usual brilliance (he only scored 16 points) and the step forward of the pair formed by Andrew Wiggins and Klay Thompson.

The other key is for this year's Celtics

to work : Jayson Tatum, a star whose shine tarnishes stats like becoming the player with the most turnovers in the postseason, Jaylen Brown and Al Holford, the first Dominican (land that nurtures the American leagues of great baseball players) who plays a final in the history of the NBA.

A 36-year-old guy on a predominantly young team with a future ahead of him who has served as glue for his teammates during the

.

Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown (right), this Wednesday in training before the sixth game, at the TD Garden in Boston.JOHN G. MABANGLO (EFE)

“This Thursday is the most important game of the career of these players and for the young people of Boston who have not seen their team fight for anything”, says Javier Limón, who in addition to being one of the most successful Spanish music producers (Paco de Lucía, Bebo and El Cigala or, recently, Alejandro Sanz), is a professor at the prestigious Berklee College of Music and has lived in the city for 12 years.

“This year I have seen how Boston turned to basketball, after a time when everything was American football, for Tom Brady's Patriots.

The emotion has been

nobody would have said at the beginning of the season that they were going to go this far.

So I trust that they know how to get up from the canvas.”

From the press box, things don't look so good.

Dan Shaughnessy, a sports columnist for the

and author of a recent book on the Larry Bird years, whose title

(Scribner, 2021) may explain his local fame as a curmudgeon, published this week an article after Game 5, "It's not over for the Celtics yet, but that feeling lingers after this missed opportunity," advising Tatum to "step up" and start behaving like "a football player." first-class NBA."

In an appearance before the media, Tatum resorted this Wednesday not so much to the history against which his people will face tomorrow as to the recent past.

He spoke about the Celtics' chances of undoing that 3-2 run and taking the title on Sunday in San Francisco: "Having shown that before should give us even more confidence that we can do it."

And in that he is right: this team has successfully flirted with disaster all season, riding on the brutal honesty of their manager, Ime Udoka.

There are only one (or two) games left to find out if that difficult path was the one that led (or not) to a happy ending.

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