<div class="quote_poster">Quote:</div><div class="quote_post">The prescription for Celtic Nation should be the same. Take two hits of perspective and get lots of rest. It?s a long season. Last Monday, the C?s lost their third in a row, one game after saying sayonara to a 25-point lead in Cleveland. Now the Celts have won three straight for the first time since April 2005, and the thought is creeping in that maybe this team can avoid a nuclear winter after all. Which Monday is real? Probably neither. At this stage of their development, the still shaky Shamrocks are headed for more climbs and descents. The best they can hope to do is handle the inevitable well. As old coach Kipling put it, ?If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same . . .? The Celtics are not so bad that they should crumble against the Cavaliers. And they are not so good that they can make as many mistakes as they did in New York two nights ago and still win on a consistent basis. The lesson is that the NBA winds shift often, sometimes violently. Those who jump to conclusive determinations based on brief samplings are doomed to verbal turnovers. Paul Pierce laughed when he thought back to last week and the despair of the Green flock. And he proceeded to take the blame. ?It was bad, but the thing is we understand what we did,? the captain said. ?You know, the guys were mad, especially with that Cleveland game. The Cleveland game really hurt me hard because I understand why we lost. I think I stopped being aggressive. I settled (for jump shots). I didn?t lead the team like I should have. We let them come back and get the crowd in the game, and that really hurt me hard. ?But the thing about this team is that we stayed together. No matter what everyone was saying about us, we didn?t get down. We kept saying we were close, and now people can see that. We?re starting to turn this thing around and win some close games. Hey, it?s a new ballgame now.? Coach Doc Rivers made one correction when presented with the scene of seven days prior. ?It was despair by everybody outside of our group,? he said. ?Nobody in our group ever thought this was over. We wanted to win, and we were desperate to win the games, but I don?t think any of us, not the players or the coaches, ever got totally down. I kept saying I like this team, and there was a reason for that. We?re still not over the hump, and we know that. The way we ended that game (losing a 20-point lead to the Knicks and holding on) shows how far we still have to go. ?But if you stay with the game plan and keep trusting each other, you?re going to be fine. At times they just get out of it, but you see how good it looks when they do what they?re supposed to. That?s why everyone has to stay patient.? </div> Source
