It's fickle. It's unforgiving. You make one mistake too many, and it all slips away.
The Celtics learned the toughest lesson of their lives on Thursday night, falling 83-79 to the Los Angeles Lakers in a Game 7 showdown that they led for most of the way.
They got close enough to taste the victory champagne, but in the end, they never got a sip.
"There's a lot of crying in our locker room," said Celtics coach Doc Rivers. "A lot of people who care. I don't think there was a dry eye. A lot of hugs, a lot of people feeling awful. That's a good thing. You know, that means everybody cared. I just can't stress enough how crazy close this team was."
Rivers had stressed togetherness all season long. These Celtics played together, they worked together, they won and lost together. Win or lose, they were going to go out fighting as a team.
And as a team, they built up a 13-point lead in the second half, going up 49-36 when Rajon Rondo drove to the basket for a layup with 8:23 left in the third quarter.
Then, as a team, they let it slip.
It was emblematic of the trying season the Celtics endured — they fought so hard, overcame so much, but they didn't have enough. The Lakers hit a flurry of clutch shots late, and in the end, it was one shot too many.
Blowing fourth-quarter leads was a problem for these Celtics all season — one so glaring, in fact, that Laker coach Phil Jackson referenced it in a huddle late in Game 5 back in Boston. That problem reared its ugly head at exactly the wrong time, as the Lakers went on a 13-4 run in the fourth quarter and ended the Celtics' season.
"I thought we stopped playing a little bit," Rivers said. "I thought we had great motion and movement throughout the game, and in that one stretch, we stopped, and it hurt us because they were scoring. One of the things I was trying to get our group to understand is we can go on scoring droughts, but they can't score. The problem was we went on that drought, and they scored."
They were without Kendrick Perkins, the backbone of their defense inside. They got killed on the glass all night long — again. They endured another horrendous shooting performance from Ray Allen, who lit the world on fire in Game 2.
And they still came close. It was bittersweet — or, for some Celtics, just plain bitter.
"Close is not enough," said Glen Davis. "You've got to win it. This is the way it is — someone has to lose, and it sucks."
"It’s disappointing," said Allen. "This is probably one of the hardest feelings I’ve felt in my lifetime. We were scratching and clawing, trying to do everything we could to pull this out. That’s probably what hurt the most — just having the opportunity to win down the stretch, and it didn’t go our way."
There was the distinct feeling after this loss that for Boston, Game 7 in Los Angeles was their last hurrah. So many of these Celtics are aging, some gracefully and others not so much, and so much uncertainty remains about next season and beyond for this team.
Even the young Celtics understand that opportunities like this don't come around every year. It takes a lot of hard work and a lot of luck to reach the game's biggest stage, and there are never any guarantees about getting back.
This team is keenly aware of what just slipped away.
"It's tough," said Rivers. "But you know, I can't reflect on it right now. Probably in a week or so, I'll go hide somewhere for a while. But you know, it was the craziest, most emotional group I've ever coached in my life. I told them they made me reach to places that I never thought I needed to go. But through it all, we were the tightest, most emotional, crazy group that I've ever been with in my life. So that's what makes it tough."
There's nothing tougher than losing Game 7 of the Finals in the closing minutes. Maybe someday, the Celtics will look back on this postseason with pride, simply because of how far they came to reach this point.
But that might take a while. For the moment, all the Celtics can do is reflect and wonder what could have been.
