Sports Teams Are the Hub of This City

This is a city of feet. You walk in Boston. At a stoplight somebody says, “How ‘bout those Sox?” You nod at the stranger and he asks, “Got tickets for tomorrow?” “For the baseball game?” you ask. “Or the Celtics, either way,” he says.

Only sports can do this for a city. And in this city most of all.

There is too much to talk about, too much to celebrate, too much to argue over, dissect, contemplate in this town on this weekend.

The Celtics are almost the Celtics again. They gradually became UnCeltic after their last NBA championship team in 1985-86. The last time they had won a playoff series was a first-round sweep of the Pacers in 1992. They were really finished being the Celtics during the Rick Pitino era, when there was lots of complaining and squabbling by players and coaches but not much winning.

There is no Boston Garden anymore and the Celtics are still trying to rebuild a connection to the fans who wandered away. For a while it was too hard to be a Celtic fan, if you had admired Bill Russell or Larry Bird or Dennis Johnson or Bob Cousy or Kevin McHale or Robert Parish. By the time Pitino went to Louisville, many fans had disconnected from the Celtics, shut down, turned off. They’d cheer politely, boo perfunctorily, but they kept their hearts to themselves.

They haven’t quite given up their hearts yet, but their chests are open. Coach Jim O’Brien is one of them, Irish, an Eastern basketball gym rat. The Celtics are in the NBA Eastern Conference finals, tied with New Jersey at a game each and home for games today and Monday on a holiday weekend.

And the Yankees are in town for four glorious games. The Yankees and Red Sox are two of the three best teams in baseball right now, according to the standings. The series started Thursday night. Pedro Martinez was brilliant, the Red Sox won, 3-1, and this city hums like a quivering tuning fork, reverberating faster and faster, noisier and noisier.

There is a group of boys playing baseball in a small park next to Logan Airport. Some are wearing Red Sox shirts, some are wearing Celtic jerseys and all of them stop their game to talk about their favorite teams.

“Paul Pierce went three for 20 and the Celtics won anyway,” 13-year-old Antonio Michael says. “No way Pierce goes three for 20 again. Nets can’t beat the green when Pierce is three for 20, whaddaya think’s gonna happen when he goes 14 for 20? Huh? Celtics rule.”

“But did you see Pedro last night?” 12-year-old Jose Portas asks. “I wish Pedro could pitch all four games this weekend. I hate the Yankees. I like the Celtics too, but I really hate the Yankees.”

Portas has lived in Boston five years. He came from Puerto Rico with his father, also Jose, five years ago. “I never heard of the Celtics or Red Sox before,” Jose says. “But they are in my head all the time now, you know? I made my father get me a radio. I want to listen to all the games all the time.”

Los Angeles is smitten with the Lakers, of course. Angelenos expect the Lakers to win another championship and don’t want or expect to hear anything else. The series with Sacramento is important and talked about. It is in all the papers, on all the talk radio stations. But Laker feeling doesn’t seem to run through the fabric of our city in quite the same way.

We are in cars and hear about the Lakers on the radio. Then we are in our houses and watch the Lakers on TV. We don’t get to walk and talk to strangers.

Around Fenway Park on Thursday night, there were dozens of men, boys, some women, who stood and listened to the Red Sox-Yankee game on the radio. They didn’t have tickets and could have been home watching on TV, but they wanted to be there. They wanted to touch a Fenway wall, buy a grilled sausage and stand next to a stranger to argue, pitch by pitch, every move on each team.

No team in baseball has been playing as well as the Anaheim Angels and nobody cares. Barely 16,000 come to the park. The games have been invisible, hardly on TV and changing radio stations every night. It’s hard work to find an Angel game and all that bad history means an empty stadium.

Here, a bad history means angst and disgust, sadness and a psychiatrist’s encyclopedia worth of analyses about what has been wrong with the Red Sox, the Celtics and the city. But it doesn’t mean empty stadiums.

“You are here for the Celtics?” the cabdriver asks. He is from Bangladesh, a Boston resident for 12 years. It is a struggle to understand the man. His voice is still rich with the sounds of his birthplace. But he wants to talk. He wants to talk Celtics.

“Don’t you think the defense the Celtics played on Tuesday turned things around?” he asks. “I think that is the difference now. The big mo has shifted.”

The cab driver understands momentum and the game and loves that “my Celtics,” as he keeps saying, played the kind of defense he expects. He says that after Bird retired, he turned his attention to the Patriots. He says it was also too heartbreaking to be a Red Sox fan. “But I like these Celtics,” he says. “They do something for me. How can I explain? I don’t know.”

There is no explaining, only enjoying. It is what sports can do. Make neighbors of everybody on one holiday weekend.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at diane.pucin@latimes.com.