Beantown Showdown

27
Years since I first followed pro basketball, beginning in the 1980-81 season.

13
Years since the Boston Celtics moved into the New Garden.

0
Times I'd seen the Celtics, my favorite NBA team, play at home prior to last night.

4
Events I saw at the old Boston Garden, none of them a Celtics or Bruins game. I saw a couple of wrestling matches there during the first heyday of the WWF in the mid-'80s. The main event for one of them was Randy "Macho Man" Savage against the Honky Tonk Man, with HTM manager Jimi Hart incarcerated in a steel cage that hung above the ring. The idea was to keep Jimi Hart from interfering with the match, but if memory serves, he managed to toss a foreign object to the Honky Tonk Man anyway -- Hart was clever that way.
I also saw a Cars concert at the Old Garden in 1987 -- it turned out to be their final tour, as they broke up less than a year later -- and I rocked in the '90s with an Aerosmith concert on New Year's Eve '89.

2
Arenas (the old Philly Spectrum and the new arena in D.C.) where I've seen the Celtics play on the road. Through the mid-'90s, it was a whole lot easier to get tickets for Celtics road games than it was to get them in Boston. It was also fun (if a little dangerous sometimes) to cheer for your team in enemy territory.

1 and 2
Last night's game pitted the NBA's No. 1 team (Boston, 47-12) against the team with the No. 2 record (Detroit, 44-17). It was the regular-season game of the year for both teams, so if it was going to take me 27 years to see the Celts play at home, this was a good game for the first.

90-78
Kevin Garnett scored a season-high 31 points and the Celtics won 90-78. Boston went 2-1 against the Pistons this year, and hopefully, the teams will meet for a best-of-seven in the playoffs this spring.