The Celtics are the sum of their experiences, and they reward loyal viewership.
Saturday's pulsating overtime victory in Philadelphia was stunning, but it shouldn't have surprised anyone who has watched them, because we've seen it all before.
Elements from some of the season's signature victories were on display in one perfect representation of their identity, and quilting together the parts that produced this latest masterpiece illustrates how and why they find themselves just a game from sweeping the Sixers and returning to the Eastern Conference Finals.
"No team is more built for having a disappointing end in regulation and then turning it around and winning it," Celtics coach Brad Stevens said at the podium. "I've never been around a group of guys, and I've been around some really special ones, that can just turn the page and play the next play the right way."
And that's as good place to start as any as we link events from Saturday's 101-98 victory to their regular-season antecedents, like so much red string on a TV detective's corkboard.
The Celtics absorbed the shock of Marco Belinelli's fallaway buzzer-beater that ended up unleashing the world's saddest pile of confetti because they've taken that punch before.
It has only been three weeks, after all, since Khris Middleton delivered an equally killer shot in Game 1 of the first round. Then as now, the Celtics had hit what felt like a buzzer-beating game-winner. Against the Bucks, it was Terry Rozier's step-back 3-pointer with half a second left. On Saturday, it was Jaylen Brown's layup off a Rozier steal.
The Sixers' stadium events crew was so jazzed by what it mistakenly viewed as a game-winning 3, it let the confetti rain, delaying the start of overtime for seven minutes of cleanup. Just as the Celtics regrouped against the Bucks to take Game 1 after falling behind by five points in OT, they overcame a similar deficit here.
"We didn't want to dwell on that,'' Horford said. "The whole confetti thing. I was like, 'Man let's go!' When you're at that point, you just want to play. I wanted to play right away, so I didn't care about the confetti.''
To even reach the confetti stage, the Celtics had turned to a scramble drill that had won them a December game in Indiana. On that night, down one, Rozier stole a looping, pressured Bojan Bogdanovic pass at halfcourt and raced to the go-ahead dunk with 1.6 seconds left.
That play should've provided a clue that Rozier had made-for-primetime in his DNA, because he has emerged as an indispensable star this postseason. On Saturday, with the Sixers holding for the last shot of regulation, Rozier jumped a lazy pass to no one from J.J. Redick and raced the other way, this time feeding Brown for the layup that gave the Celtics a two-point lead with 1.7 seconds left.
"We stayed with it," Horford said. "We kept fighting."
That Brown made the shot shouldn't have surprised anyone, either. Playing 29 minutes on a bad hamstring, he delivered 16 gutsy points and nine rebounds. His biggest shot of the year came in Utah when he drilled a game-winning 3-pointer with less than a second left. This time he just had to make a layup, and now he's got his eyes on closing out the series.
"We've got to finish the drill," Brown told reporters. "I'm not one that was ever taught to play with our food. So when it comes down to it, we've got to finish it. It's first to four, so we've got to take care of business."
The Celtics rallied on a pair of brilliant timeout calls from head coach Brad Stevens. The first found Brown for the tying layup late in regulation. The second, with 8.8 seconds left, correctly predicted a Sixers switch that left Horford all alone on Robert Covington. Marcus Morris perfectly executed the lob pass and Horford laid it in with 5.5 seconds left.
"We got two game-winning, game-tying buckets -- layups," Brown told reporters. "I think that says it all. We played hard, we fought, it was a tough environment, but when it came down to an ATO to draw up a big basket that we needed, we're getting layups. I tip my hat off to Brad Stevens."
Stevens drew up game-winning plays for Horford against the Rockets (baby hook in post) and Blazers (elbow fallaway at buzzer) this season, and he predicted how the Sixers would defend this one to an extent that left his players awed and nearly speechless.
"That man Brad Stevens is a guru," Morris told reporters. "He might have the best out-of-bounds plays I've ever seen. He called the switch. He knew it was going to happen."
It still took Horford to finish it, and his falling, twisting layup while getting hacked wasn't easy, but it's the type of shot he has made all year. Horford had produced a relatively quiet offensive game to that point, his focus instead on the defensive end, where he alternately defended dynamic point guard Ben Simmons and overpowering big man Joel Embiid.
Horford finished with 13 points, but seven of them came in overtime. It's easy to forget that in the dramatic Rockets win -- the Marcus Smart-James Harden double-charge game -- Horford scored only nine points, including the game-winner.
"He just makes everybody's job so easy," Rozier told Jay King of The Athletic. "And I'm grateful to have him on our team. He's our vet. What he says goes, and he's been around. He's just great, a future Hall of Famer."
If Horford occupies one end of the spectrum, then rookie Jayson Tatum resides at the other. The 20-year-old with ice water in his veins made a series of huge shots in the fourth quarter and overtime, much as he has all season.
On Saturday, he decided his best course of action was attack mode, and he scored twice at the rim over Embiid with the game in the balance.
It was reminiscent of a comeback over the Nets in January, when Tatum drove for a dunk to give the Celtics the lead with a minute left, and then drilled a 3-pointer off a scramble from Kyrie Irving to ice it. He also didn't let three crucial missed free throws derail him, a lesson that traces in part to a March loss to the Wizards when Tatum missed the and-one free throw that would've won the game in regulation before the C's fell in overtime.
"No moment is too big," Stevens said. "He's got guts."
And so the Celtics pulled out another win that we hesitate to label improbable, because they've done it all year. Next-man-up is only supposed to apply to sports like football and baseball, not the star-driven NBA. But we've already the seen the Celtics win games in Utah without Horford and Kyrie Irving, in Portland without Brown and Irving, and nearly in Milwaukee without a point guard.
So don't call this a surprise. The Celtics have laid out clues all year, and it's not their fault that we're only connecting the dots now.
