Game 7 ended the Celtics’ season before any of us were ready to let go

BOSTON — Minutes after Jayson Tatum was ruled out of Game 7, Joe Mazzulla walked into the media room wearing a black “Celtics Mindset” hoodie. He didn’t raise his voice or change his tone. “This season was about creating different identities,” he said. “We’ve done this before.”

It landed the way most of his comments do. Calm. Controlled. Almost separate from the moment.

Out on the floor, it didn’t feel that way.

By the time warmups started, there was a tension in the building that didn’t need volume to be obvious. You could see it in how people stood. Conversations shorter than usual. A few deep exhales mixed into the usual pregame buzz. When I was interviewing fans before Game 5, there were plenty of smiles and laughs. Not so much tonight. A Game 7 without one of your best players will do that to a fanbase.

Still, the players didn’t show it. Derrick White jogged out early, smiling, acknowledging the crowd. Payton Pritchard followed, more locked in than jovial, but that’s just PP. Sam Hauser stood along the sideline talking quietly with his family before heading back to the locker room, his dad giving him a firm pat on the back before saying goodbye.

For the Celtics, this was either going to be one more night of many more to come or the last one for a while.

I got to my press seat a few minutes before tip, right around the time the starting lineup was announced.

Ron Harper Jr.
Luka Garza.
Baylor Scheierman.
Derrick White.
Jaylen Brown.

Joe heard the calls for adjustments and went full Michael Keaton. “You wanna get nuts? Fine. Let’s get nuts.”

Sitting next to me was a reporter from Istanbul, there for Adem Bona, who moved to Turkey at age 13 to play professionally with Istanbul Basket. His name? Bozkurt. His third language? English. But I’d soon learn that he knew enough English, and enough about basketball, to spend the next two and a half hours becoming my temporary Game 7 nemesis.

We shook hands. The game started. I had no idea the stranger sitting next to me was going to help me cope with the end of the Celtics’ season.

The terrible, horrible, no good, very bad first quarter

The first few possessions didn’t do anything to settle the nerves.

Three early shots, all from deep, all missed. No paint touches or pressure on the defense. By the 9:36 mark, Boston still hadn’t scored, and Philadelphia looked right at home despite playing on the road.

As he had the past few games, Joel Embiid set the tone right away. When Boston stayed home, he stepped into midrange jumpers. When help came, he moved the ball cleanly. There was no rush to anything he was doing. By the end of the quarter, he had 10 points, 4 rebounds and 5 assists, and it never felt like he had to force it.

Philadelphia shot 65 percent in the first quarter. They led 32-19, while Boston looked like a team still trying to figure out what the game was going to ask of them.

There was movement offensively, which was encouraging, but not a whole lot of purpose. Possessions drifted late into the clock. Too much dribbling without forcing a decision. On the other end, it was worse. Backdoor cuts. Easy entries. Not nearly enough resistance.

After Game 6, Jayson Tatum had pointed to the importance of getting stops. Through one quarter, the stops were few and far between.

Bozkurt didn’t need to say much early. He didn’t have to. Every Embiid jumper seemed to make his case for him. Every clean Sixers cut, every easy action, every possession where Philadelphia looked like the team with the clearer plan. He’d react with a small nod or a sound that somehow carried the same meaning as a 500-word column.

“Besides Shaq, Embiid has to be most dominant center ever, yes?” Bozkurt asked, or really, stated.

I was still at the point where I felt the need to be professional and courteous. The best I could muster was, “He’s pretty good!”

In any case, the Celtics looked uncomfortable from the jump, and the Sixers looked right at home in TD Garden.

Mazzulla started looking elsewhere for answers early. Pritchard checked in before the eight-minute mark. Queta followed. Walsh soon after. By the end of the quarter, Boston had already gone deep into its bench.

It didn’t fix the first quarter. But it sure did change the second.

The stretch that pulled everyone back in

The second quarter didn’t open clean either, but it felt different almost right away.

Hugo González, who had seen a total of six minutes of action in this series coming into Game 7, checked in and gave Boston something it had been desperately searching for: resistance. He picked up Maxey, fought through screens, and stayed attached far better than most Celtics players had fared through the series. It wasn’t perfect, but it made Philadelphia work a little more to get into what it wanted.

At the other end, Derrick White started to steady things.

A floater. A pull-up. Then a three that brought it back within two. On the next possession, he drew an offensive foul, and the building woke up with it.

Pritchard followed with a three, and suddenly Boston had its first lead of the night.

I couldn’t help it. I fist-pumped. Take that, Bozkurt.

This is the part where I’m supposed to tell you I handled the whole night with the professional detachment expected from someone sitting in a media section. I did not. Not really. The first time I covered a game with credentials, which was Tatum’s return game and Cooper Flagg’s first one in Boston, I kept it together. Game 5 cracked me a little. Game 7 fully found the Celtics fan in me and dragged him out by the collar.

Part of that was the game. Part of that was the Garden. And part of it was Bozkurt.

He had come to cover Bona, but with Bona on the bench, he became an Embiid backer by necessity. Or maybe by choice. I’m still not sure. At one point in the second quarter, he leaned over, put two hands on my shoulders, and unprompted, said, “Two players with best whistle in league. SGA. Tatum.”

That’s what I was dealing with.

The Celtics, meanwhile, were finally giving me something to work with.

The ball was moving like it was early on in the season. Players cut with purpose instead of watching and waiting for their turn to go 1-on-1. Defensively, there were hands in passing lanes, bodies meeting drives earlier, and far more urgency across the floor. It wasn’t perfect, but it was connected and it was effort.

White carried the scoring, pouring in 19 by halftime. Jaylen Brown started to find his rhythm later in the quarter, while Queta was finally able to give them useful minutes without getting into foul trouble. Hugo was the biggest spark of the first half.

It felt like a montage of the regular season. One guy after another stepping forward as if to say, “Hey, remember me? Remember what I brought to this season?”

After Game 6, Brown had talked about playing faster, freer, with more trust in the group. For a stretch in the second quarter, that version showed up.

Still, the game never fully flipped. Embiid came back in and slowed everything down again. A rebound here. A trip to the line there. The lead stretched back out just enough to keep Boston chasing.

At halftime, it was 55-50. Given where it started, you had to take it.

Bozkurt looked up at the scoreboard, then over at me.

“Careful,” he said.

He was right. Annoyingly, painfully right.

The fight was real. So was the hole.

The third quarter was always going to say a lot about how the Celtics felt about this game. Boston had survived the first half. Now was the time to turn survival into control.

Queta opened with a smooth move over Embiid. A few possessions later, Maxey hit a three, then an effortless midrange jumper. The lead was back to double digits before fans had even settled back in their seats.

Keep it close became the quiet mantra for myself. Maybe not even quiet. I’m pretty sure I wrote it in my notes three or four times because I was trying to convince myself as much as anyone.

Brown gave them a moment out of a timeout, an and-one midrange that cut it back to eight. Then, Pritchard hit a three to make it a one-possession game. Jaylen took on the Embiid assignment and clapped in his face, prompting Embiid to talk that talk after making a shot. For a minute, it felt like something personal was brewing between the two of them.

That was the fun part.

The less fun part was that Philadelphia kept answering.

Embiid dragged the game back to his pace. Maxey found enough cracks. Paul George, who seemed to locate the Indiana version of himself for this series, hit a big three whenever Boston needed him not to.

At one point, the lead hit 15. Then 18.

Bozkurt put his arm around me again and said, “Sorry, brother.”

I laughed because I didn’t know what else to do. What a ridiculous place to be. Sitting at the top of TD Garden, in a Game 7, next to a man from Istanbul who had become my emotional support rival. He was half consoling me, half enjoying the fact that Embiid was dismantling everything I held near and dear to my heart.

The Garden was still trying, despite Bozkurt’s Philadelphia’s best efforts. “Let’s Go Celtics” chants broke out during a timeout, but it didn’t sound like the usual Garden roar. Stunned is how I would describe it. Down 18 at home in Game 7 after leading the series 3-1, it felt appropriate.

After three quarters, it was 88-75.

Boston was shooting under 40 percent. Philadelphia was over 50. The Celtics needed a miracle.

For much of the fourth quarter, they made everyone believe in one.

The last time we got to believe

The fourth quarter started with Hauser hitting a three to cut it to ten. Derrick White followed with a steal and a layup to make it eight. The building responded immediately, like it had been waiting for permission to get to that yet-unreached decibel level.

By then, Bozkurt was on his feet too.

I looked over at him and nodded. No words needed.

Not done yet.

When Jaylen scored off a great pass from White to cut it to six, the Garden felt alive in a way that made the previous three quarters feel like they belonged to a different night. Nervous murmurs became excited murmurs. Everyone was standing. Bill Chisholm was on his feet courtside. Spider Kid was on the jumbotron. Save us, Spider Kid.

Queta finished through contact and turned to the crowd, yelling, and it was one of those moments where the game and the fandom stopped feeling like separate things.

Queta felt the energy immediately and leaned into it, chest out, screaming back at 19,156 people who were already halfway out of their seats.

We saw a version of that in Game 5 with Walsh, a small play that turned into something bigger because of how quickly the crowd grabbed onto it. This felt the same, just louder, heavier, more desperate.

In that stretch, everything was feeding everything else. The defense, the effort, the noise. In TD Garden, it doesn’t take much for that loop to close. And once it does, it’s hard to tell who’s pushing who.

Jaylen followed with an and-one. One-point game.

At that point, the idea of acting like a neutral observer felt deeply stupid. Bozkurt was standing. Hell, everyone was standing. The Garden was so loud that even if I cheered, no one would hear me anyway. I’m all the way up here, I told myself. I write for CelticsBlog. Who am I pretending for?

For a stretch, the Celtics looked like the team Brown later wished they had trusted more.

“I wish we trusted that style more,” Brown said after the game. “You saw tonight how everybody came out and played their tail off.”

He was right. During that run, all five guys on the floor mattered. The ball was zipping. The defense was hounding. Queta crashed. White pushed. Pritchard spaced. Hauser hit. Jaylen guarded Embiid and had some seriously loud blocks in the fourth like he was trying to drag the whole season back by himself.

It got down to one again and again.

But they never broke through.

Brown had a three go in and out. Pritchard missed a wide-open three after a ridiculous Jaylen block. Then Brown missed a clean midrange look, followed by a Hauser miss from deep. Five straight empty trips at the worst possible time.

After the game, Mazzulla said they had “two or three great looks to take the lead.”

They sure did. They just didn’t go in. As one fan told me before Game 5, it feels like a make-or-miss league these days.

Maxey answered. Then again. The lead stretched. The air came out in pieces. The game didn’t end all at once. But eventually, it faded into oblivion.

109-100.

What you can say right away, and what you can’t

The first thing that hits you in a Game 7 loss isn’t analysis.

It’s that it’s over.

I get that no one wants a positive spin right now. No one should. The Celtics blew a 3-1 series lead for the first time in franchise history. They lost three straight, two of them at home. And they lost to the Sixers. That all matters, and it will matter for a long time.

There will be hours and days to unpack all of it. The lineup choices. The reliance on three-point shooting. The offensive lulls. The defensive possessions where Embiid looked far too comfortable. The missed chances in Games 5 and 6. The way a season that once felt like a bonus, then an opportunity, somehow ended as a gut punch.

But in the immediate aftermath, sitting there while the Garden emptied out, I kept coming back to the same thing.

I loved watching this team.

That doesn’t make the loss sting any less, and it doesn’t make the collapse easier to swallow. Nor does it mean anyone has to skip the anger stage and move straight to gratitude because that would be obnoxious, and also impossible.

But this team gave us more than most people expected back in October. More than any team without Jayson Tatum for most of the year had any business giving. More than a gap year was supposed to contain.

Jaylen said as much after the game.

“This is probably one of my most fun years playing basketball,” he said. “I’m so grateful to be with this group.”

That matched what I felt watching them, even in a loss that will sit with Celtics fans for a long while. They were imperfect. Weird. Fun. Stubborn. Occasionally maddening. Sometimes hard to explain. They won a lot of basketball games and made a lot of people care more than they expected to. That can make the downfall hurt even more.

Mazzulla talked about the other side of chasing something bigger.

“When you go after something bigger than yourself,” he said, “you have to accept the other side of that.”

That is a very Joe way to put it. Maybe a little too philosophical when the wound is still so raw. But there’s truth in it, even if nobody wants to hear it yet.

Bozkurt stayed for a minute after the final buzzer. Not long. Just enough to take one more look around before leaving. Then he turned to me, pulled me in for a quick hug, and said, “Always next year.”

It wasn’t gloating. It wasn’t even really about the result. It felt like acknowledgment, like he understood what that game had just taken out of the people in that building.

I told him good luck, and I meant it. No edge left, no need for one. Somewhere along the way, the whole back-and-forth stopped feeling like a battle and started feeling more like a friendship.

I don’t think Bozkurt knew every Celtics rotation or the full weight of what it meant for this franchise to blow a 3-1 lead. And I certainly didn’t know much about Istanbul or what this Sixers team meant to him.

But basketball has its own language. You can feel when a game is slipping, just like you can feel when a crowd still believes. You can also feel when something is over before the clock says it is.

Those parts translated just fine. And for the record, if we ever revisit the “Embiid vs. every center ever” conversation, I’ll be sending him a playlist. Kareem. Hakeem. Russell. Wilt. We’ll take it from there.

Eventually, the Garden made everyone leave. Bozkurt. Me. All of us.

I wasn’t ready. Being around this team up close a few times this season only made it harder to let go of it. The way they played, the way the building responded to them, the way nights like this could swing from hopeless to electric in a matter of minutes.

The season ended earlier than it should have, and that part won’t sit right for a while.

But it was a ride I never will, and never would want to, forget.