Al Horford didn’t know what to do with himself when the moment struck.
He flung the ball into the air, and then flung himself into a sea of teammates, finally able to celebrate a trip to the NBA Finals.
Kind of wild for a guy who, at this point last year, was still a member of the Oklahoma City Thunder.
“I would look at -- on the phone I would look at photos from a year ago, exactly what I was doing at the moments, and today my son actually graduated from kindergarten,” Horford said after Boston’s Game 7 win over Miami. "So I remember that we had pictures for him and I picked him up from school and we had the cupcakes and we had all this stuff. So it's like perspective for me, like I always look back and see where I was just day-to-day.
“I'm just very grateful to be in this position with these guys.”
The photos Horford saves to his phone today will be of him kissing a Conference championship trophy, a trophy this team earned the hard way.
“This journey is not easy. We had a hard path,” Horford said. “Brooklyn, Milwaukee, the defending champs, and Miami -- it's a team that, look what they did, they took us to the brink.”
The Celtics need to be more specific when talking about the brink, because they’ve had a few this season. This team has been pushed to the edge over and over, and they’ve never once fallen over it. They’ve looked over it a lot. They’ve probably remarked about how far down that fall is. But no matter how bad things looked from the outside, they never once came close to losing their balance and falling off that cliff.
“I never felt that. I know what a good group essentially feels like. I felt that all along,” said Jayson Tatum, the first-ever winner of the Larry Bird trophy for Eastern Conference Finals MVP. “Everybody believed, and I think that was -- that's half the battle, everybody believing and wanting to for the right reasons. It was just a matter of time, honestly.”
Their faith in each other buoyed them through the early struggles, and pushed them to higher than expected highs through February, March, and April. The identity created by their coach made sure that success continued through May.
“(Ime Udoka) embodies everything that we embody, and he kind of puts it on you to let you know that, hey, 'I'm not taking no slack, and if you don't like it, then you can get up out of here,'” Marcus Smart said. “That's the type of group we are. We don't want to be babied. We're grown men, we're professionals and we want to be treated like that, and he comes in and he does that, and that helps us a lot.”
The ball Horford tossed came down in the middle of the scrum. It was scooped up by referee Scott Foster as he walked off the floor, Boston too oblivious in the commotion to snatch it and hand it to the coach for his first trip to the Finals.
Not that he’d want it.
The Celtics are celebrating on their plane ride home as these words are being written. They may not need turbo engines to feel as high as they do right now, but the celebration will only last as long as the flight does.
“It would be all for naught if we go lay an egg in the Finals,” Udoka said. “We don't hang or celebrate Eastern Conference championships in the Celtic organization. So we all fall in line and appreciate that standard of excellence.”
This is what players sign up for when they play in Boston. Every move Brad Stevens has made, every move Danny Ainge made before him, has been geared towards building a champion. Udoka was hired to take the lateral from Stevens and get this team across the goal line. He’s had to break a few tackles along the way, but now he’s in the red zone.
Still, the path to this moment has been a long one for Tatum, Horford, Smart, and Brown. They walked into this game with the hot take hoards cartoonishly licking their chops and rubbing their knives and forks together, ready to eat them alive with unending talk about legacies and their actual ability to get to the promised land.
This is a celebration they've earned the hard way, through a few disappointments over the years. It’s quite fitting that each of the first three rounds has featured wins over a team that has eliminated them in the playoffs.
They've earned a little extra time with the Bob Cousy trophy, and maybe an extra beer or two on the flight home. It’s been a long time coming, even for a group of mostly young guys. They’ve earned a day off their feet.
They know what’s ahead of them. They know their job isn’t done.
“No matter what adversity is put in front of us, no obstacle, no loop, we're going to get through it, we're going to get over it, we're going to get around it,” Smart said. “That was just how we live our lives on the court. We really, truly believe that. We know we're going up against a great team with the Warriors, great players, great organization. They have the track record to prove it. They know exactly what it takes. They've been here. They're vets. We know we've got a long road in front of us, but we're up for the challenge.”
