The greatest NBA playoff series ever

I want to hate this Bulls-Celtics series; honestly, I do. With Boston Fan being so damned self-involved, I don't want to watch this; I don't want to get sucked in. And yet, it's just ridiculous.

After a legitimately great Game 1 overtime win in Boston, the Bulls-Celtics series had settled down into a case of Champions Schooling Children, the way that just about every neutral observer might have guessed. Game 2 was a tight game in which Ray Allen got the better of Ben Gordon, and Game 3 was an absolute spanking by the road team.

Today in Chicago, both teams played a game for the ages, going to double overtime and more or less making Cavs-Pistons Game Four unwatched outside of its home markets. You had it all: Actual Unpleasantness between Brad Miller and Big Baby Davis (seriously, the latter has absolutely nothing on Vlade Divac; he was right up there with Soccer Player in terms of going down from minimal contact), astonishing defensive lapses from the young home team, startling clutch shots, etc., etc. Finally the home-town team outlasted the older team in double overtime, 121-118, and we've got a 2-2 series.

Let's start with what the Association's haters and Hockey Fan will notice: the fun of hearing Bulls Fan chant Bull S*it, along with Jeff van Gundy (shockingly!) going in favor of the ugliness. Kudos, also, to the game's refs, who reacted to the Davis Flop by ringing up fouls on the road team; frankly, when your team has a player that does something like that, you should get the next half-dozen calls against you on general principles. (Actual telecast transcript: "Rondo does a good job falling down." Yes, good job, there. That's what basketball should be about -- selling fouls.)

You start with the point guards. Derrick Rose and Rajon Rondo are wonderful to watch, and while Rose's game appeals to the purists more, Rondo is the better player, at least this year: when you throw down a triple double with no turnovers, you make up for your lack of a reliable mid-range jumper. Ben Gordon made an unconscionable shot to give the home team the lead with just over 30 seconds to go. Allen replied from distance with just under 10 second left, as the Bulls decided that guarding him at that point in the game might keep them from a longer off-season vacation.

I want to hate this. I'm not a fan of either team. It's not like it's the only good series in the Association this year. It's a first-round series, not a second, third or fourth. It's between two teams that have absolutely no chance of playing for the championship in six weeks. (And before you start, Celtics Fan, your team had Brian Scalabrine playing meaningful minutes today. Next.) At the end of it, I'm still convinced that we're going to have a hard-fought but absolutely predictable Celtics win, more or less how everyone saw this coming before it started.

When I'm watching Kendrick Perkins dueling Sideshow Bob Noah down low, I'm really not thinking that this is something that I'm going to telling my kids about. When I see John Salmons and Kirk Hinrich failing to stop Paul Pierce, I don't think Pierce is going to put this on his highlight reel as one of the defining highlights of his life. When I see Vinny del Negro pacing the sidelines, I don't think Lemur Classic. Sorry.

And yet...

You've got a young team beating on an old one. You've got a champion getting scared out of their jock in the first round. You've got rookies serving notice, live crowds filled with hate, and just enough scumbags on both sides that you expect to see violence before it ends. Watching Kevin Garnett in a suit makes me smile, and if you don't enjoy watching Scalabrine cry over a clear path foul call, you don't have a pulse. It's freaking great.

It's also teeth-rattlingly frustrating, because I'd really like to play the Resentment Card on this. While this is going on, my little 6 Seed That Might (your Philadelphia 76ers) is up 2-1 against the Magic. Unlike the Celtics series, every game has been competitive to the final whistle. Unlike the Celtics' series, the games have seen crazy comebacks (Philly came from 18 down in the first two games to win the first and make the second competitive, and in Game 3, the Magic rallied from down a dozen to make it a single-possession game). In my team's series, there has been two last-second game-winning shots by Andre Iguodala and Thaddeus Young. You've got the best power player in the Association (Dwight Howard), one of the best three-point shooters (Rashard Lewis), one of the best all-around guard duos (the Andres, Miller and Iguodala), and a potentially emerging second-year man in Young.

And what did the Bad Tooth say about this series? That it was the worst in the East this year, if not the worst playoff matchup in decades. That Philly Fan didn't care about his team, and hated them, because they dared to make the Elton Brand Move, which is something no team's fans could ever forgive, giving how incredibly stupid it was to overpay for a low-post scorer and rebounder for a team that desperately needed low-post scoring in its first -round playoff loss last year. Oh, and just for good measure, he also pissed all over the AI 2000 series against Milwaukee, resurrecting the hoary chestnut that the Milwaukee Bucks' kitten-soft jump-shooting team led by Furious George Karl, Glenn Robinson, Sam Cassels and Allen were robbed, robbed I say, by a team with superior team defense and the clear Most Valuable Player.

Honestly, life is annoying enough for Philly Fan; he gets to hear how wonderful New York History is, how someone else's rivalry just always matters more, how wonderful Boston Success is, and how awful he is, really, for daring to boo people who deserve it, or for caring enough about the outcome of the game to try to influence by making the visiting team's supporters and players uncomfortable.

But none of that matters when it comes to what it is in front of you, which is Celtics 2, Bulls 2... and who knows, maybe the double overtime was just enough extra minutes to finally take the starch out of the champions; the game did take over 3.5 hours, after all. We Shall See.