How the Celtics Helped Me Enjoy Berlin
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| Credit goes to peakpx.com |
I couldn't watch any of the first three games of this series live, so I had to trust this team to manage without me.
I've mentioned it several times, but for those who don't know: I'm currently in Germany.
Since March 1st, all my Boston Celtics watching, writing, and groaning in pain has been done from Germany, while I'm studying at a university here until August. It has been an incredible experience, but the strange six-hour difference from Eastern Standard Time means Celtics games start around 1 to 2 a.m. local time.
This isn't an insurmountable obstacle. The esteemed Adam Taylor has been improving European Celtics blogging from England long before I could form a complete sentence, and if I'm not determined to find ways to enjoy the playoff run—a run I'll remember for the rest of my life—then I'm nothing.
“I know a lot of English and European people who stay up late to watch games live. I can’t do that,” Adam told me as I was writing this article. “For one thing, I’m a dad. I have parenting duties in the morning. Secondly, I’ve never been able to experience games that way.”
For Adam and many other European basketball lovers, it all hinges on the NBA League Pass "hide scores" button, which allows someone to watch full replays of all games without any spoilers, as long as they manage their notifications and avoid family texts and friends. I often wake up to over a hundred unread texts and muted notifications from my 76 different sports apps, but I’m compelled to resist in favor of watching the game spoiler-free...
If I weren't completely insane, regularly staying up until 5 a.m. to watch Celtics playoff games live, I would do just that. I see no contradiction in moving my life five hours back and sleeping from 6 a.m. to noon, like a medical professional working shifts. I have my own room, a very flexible class schedule, and good blackout curtains.
Maybe I’m too young, or maybe I’m too crazy, but I generally can’t wait until the next morning to know if the team I’ve emotionally invested an absurd amount in will fulfill the promise they made two years ago: get back to the Finals and complete the deal.
In any case, European Oliver is largely a product of American Oliver. Lifelong British time zone resident Adam also mentioned how watching a game live can be harder than watching a replay for him, as it’s such an alien concept—a point made very purposefully.
Adam mentioned, "I get irritated during timeouts or free throws because I can't skip ahead to the action. I hate that if I see something I like and want to try, I’m behind everyone else watching live. Honestly, I struggle to watch in real-time."
Regardless, my erratic sleep schedule was effective until last week when I and fellow Americans in my exchange program took a week's vacation in Berlin. I was sharing a room with two other people with the worst curtains ever, and we were, you know… in Berlin—a place with more after-dark activities than anywhere else on Earth.
Our schedule was also quite full, so my graveyard-shift-medical-professional routine wasn’t going to work with 8:30 a.m. alarms and catching trains. And so, I didn’t see a single second of Games 1, 2, and 3 live, activating my spoiler-free replay bag while waiting for my friends to wake up.
I had to rely on the Celtics to get through it without me. For the first time in my life, I felt like I wasn’t part of the game. I felt like a historian observing past events, compelled to endure all the emotions of the moment without discussing them with my friends or family. It felt a bit like madness.
For career-Europeans, watching replays is entirely normal, but for me, it’s a form of psychological warfare. Whenever the Pacers would go on a run, I’d be tempted to skip ahead in the recording because I didn’t want to deal with the pain and agony. And in the back of my mind, I knew I could just check who won at any point, and all my fears and worries would somehow vanish.
But every time I was tempted by that impulse, I remembered why I love basketball. It’s not about knowing who wins. It’s not about winning or losing the game, scoring enough points to silence the haters, or finally hoisting the trophy.
It’s about that split second when the ball is in the air, and no living person knows if it will go in. Even the NBA-produced 10-minute highlight reels don’t work because until the last few minutes, they only show made shots, blocks, or steals. Once Andrew Nembhard gets the shot, I know it’s going in.
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But I Live for That Split Second
However, I thrive on that split-second of uncertainty when the outcome could go either way. Maybe that’s why I love these Celtics so much, because they hunt threes so aggressively, providing me with so many high-octane split-second moments. In those moments, it can feel like the fate of the universe is hanging by a thread, and no one can do anything about it.
There’s nothing else in the world that can make me pump my fist like a madman in complete silence in a Berlin hotel room when Jaylen Brown hits a shot over Pascal Siakam. Nor is there anything that can make me quietly celebrate at 6 a.m., just like when Jayson Tatum slipped a behind-the-back pass to Al Horford and Jrue Holiday stole the ball but sealed it for everyone else.
And then there’s my prediction that the Celtics would beat the Pacers, a very odd thing that was only about 12 hours away from making me look like a genius. I had to rely on the Celtics to handle it, and they performed brilliantly.
They’ll call me back for Game 4, but I couldn’t be prouder of this team for letting me get some sleep last week and enjoy Berlin without worrying if I’d have to deal with Celtics obituaries. In the immortal words of many, the job’s not finished. But we can call this an official thank you note for truly a wonderful week.
G.Rishi
I love historical stories and that's why I created newsworldreport.com to publish history and historical past, present, and future stories and news about the world and Apophis The infamous asteroid and other historical subjects keep reading my news stories and give solution about it.
