A month to play, and the Red Sox led the Rays by nine games. The Sox couldn’t lose.

Three games to play, headed to Baltimore for a three-game set while the Rays prepared for the Yanks, still ahead by a game. The Sox couldn’t lose.

Tampa down seven runs in the season’s final game heading into the eighth inning, the Sox ahead by one run in a rain delay during the seventh. The Sox couldn’t lose.

Tampa came back, tied the game 7-7 on a home run while down to their last strike, but at least the Sox were still ahead by one, Papelbon on the mound. The Sox could lose, but it was still improbable.

Papelbon worked Baltimore to their last strike, with some Oriole named Nolan Reimold — he of the .246 batting average and warning track power — at the plate. Meanwhile, in Florida, the Rays were still tied with the Yankees in extra innings. Once again, the Sox couldn’t lose.

But they did.

Is there a Celtics equivalent to blowing a nine-game lead in the season’s final month, coughing up a one-game lead during a three-game series against the Baltimore friggin’ Orioles, giving away a ninth-inning lead in a must-win game, a pack of gutless, more-than-well-compensated players playing each game with the intensity of a grandmother knitting a yarn scarf, and meanwhile, Tampa Bay comes back from seven runs down and wins on a walkoff home run in the twelfth?

Probably not, mostly because eight teams make the playoffs in the NBA, but let me try. For the purposes of this exercise, I am throwing out all limitations, such as a salary cap or even common sense.

The Celtics spend the offseason bulking up their roster with big names. They sign Jeff Green (let’s call him Carl Crawford) and Dwight Howard (let’s call him Adrian Gonzalez), entering the season with a Rondo-Allen-Pierce-Garnett-Howard-Green top six that everyone instantly hails “the best lineup ever.”

And then the Celtics start the season 1-7. Jeff “Carl Crawford” Green struggles in his new role and WEEI callers compare him to The Tin Man from Wizard of Oz — no heart. Howard is dominant as usual, at least defensively, but the mainstays — the Fantastic Four — struggle to regain their past magic. It’s as if they’re getting old or something. Everyone begins to jump off the bandwagon… just in time for the Celtics to start playing like the best team in basketball.

For the next three quarters of the season, the Celtics become who we thought they were. Howard swats shots into the fifteenth row. Garnett screams gutturally after every win. Rondo handles the passing, Pierce and Allen handle the scoring, and, well Jeff Green is still doing his best impersonation of The Tin Man. The Celtics enter the final month of the season (12 games remaining) ahead by seven games for the eighth and final playoff spot (remember, this is just an excercise, so pretend they could play like the best team in basketball for three-quarters of the season and still be that close to missing the playoffs).

Suddenly, everything goes wrong. Rondo starts throwing passes into Mark Wahlberg’s courtside seat. Allen gets hurt. Pierce doesn’t seem like he cares very much. Howard smiles too often. Garnett, who we’ll now call Dustin Pedroia, is the only player who acts like he still gives a damn. The ship is sinking and Jeff Green is still coming off the bench, a painful reminder of everything that wasn’t supposed to go wrong. Meanwhile, the Philadelphia 76ers won’t lose a goddamn game and Boston’s seven-game lead isn’t dwindling — it’s being thrown off the Empire State Building and free-falling until it reaches a painful death.

The Celtics are still tied going into the season’s last day. Their opponent is the Minnesota Timberwolves. The 76ers are playing the Lakers, but the Lakers have clinched the West’s top seed and will rest their biggest assholes… err, I mean their biggest stars. Boston trades for Travis “Bruce Chen” Outlaw in case they need some help in a possible one-game playoff.

But it doesn’t look like they’ll need Outlaw. The Lakers jump to a 25-point lead against Philly and maintain it into the fourth-quarter. The Celtics, meanwhile, build a five-point lead against the Wolves. Even though it’s not a huge lead, they seem to have control of the game.

And then hell has its first snowstorm. Andre Iguodala hits two four-point plays. Lou Williams cannot miss. Thaddeus Young dunks on Luke Walton’s head (remember, the Lakers are playing their scrubs). When Iggy scores five points in less than twenty seconds, the 76ers are down only three points with ten seconds to play.

Meanwhile, Boston’s lead is maintaining. But they are missing opportunities to put the game away — or, as my fifth-grade baseball coach used to say, to close the damn door. Garnett misses some bunnies. Howard slams a dunk into the back rim. Rondo misses free throws (surprise, surprise). Pierce’s month-long fog still hasn’t lifted. And Green sits on the bench, where he will stay unless a starter fouls out. With twenty-five seconds left, Boston’s lead is still four. No need for a fire alarm yet.

But the 76ers pull a miracle from their behinds. The Lakers miss two free throws that would have sealed the game (for some reason, we’ll call it “trying to sabotage another team’s season”, Steve Blake shoot both free throws with a blindfold on) and Philly gets one more chance to tie. Iguodala is not a fan of the three-point arc, but he drains one at the buzzer, sending Philly fans into a seizure of celebration.

Then the Celtics surrender a bucket to Ricky Rubio, who scores approximately one bucket every ten games. He’s fouled, too, by Ray Allen, and it’s Allen’s sixth. That means The Tin Man enters the game. Celtics fans everywhere hold their breath. Rubio cans the free throw, cutting the Celtics lead to one with nine seconds left. Michael Beasley steals the ensuing inbounds pass. As time runs out on the clock, he drills a three-pointer while Jeff Green, who was supposed to guard Beasley, saunters after him like a high school bully who enjoys being late to class.

Before the Red Sox can even say “what the fuck just happened?”, Iguodala dunks home a Lou Williams miss as time expires to send Philly into the playoffs. Dwight Howard says something about how “it wasn’t God’s plan” for the Celtics to make the playoffs this season, and millions of viewers think to themselves, “yeah, I imagine God spends most of his time worrying about who gets the 8th seed in the NBA’s Eastern Conference.”

There is good news for the Celtics, though: they still have The Tin Man under contract for six years and $120 million.

Thank God this is only a hypothetical, huh?

[Editor's note: the quote in this piece are all from an interview Rajon Rondo gave for Dime Magazine. You should read the whole interview.]

He’s the type of person who probably believes he could climb Mt. Everest while carrying a grand piano, so when Rajon Rondo is asked who would win a one-on-one tournament among all NBA point guards, his answer is expected:

“Me,” Rondo tells Dime Magazine’s Austin Burton.

Asked who he would beat in the finals of the hypothetical one-on-one tournament, Rondo remains in character.

“Whoever gets there.”

The University of Kentucky product has considered himself the NBA’s best point guard since long before he was in the conversation. He is the type to look around his locker room, see three guaranteed Hall of Famers and a possible Hall of Fame coach, and believe his own voice should be the most trusted. He is cocky and brash, willing to toot his own horn, and competitive enough to play one-armed against the Miami Heat. Losing to the Los Angeles Lakers was the worst moment of his basketball life and the Heat loss hurt, too. Rondo carries the disappointments of the last three seasons with him, motivation to be ready when the next opportunity comes.

Those losses only poured more cement on Rondo’s goal, a championship. “It won’t be no different this season,” Rondo tells Dime.

But some things will be different. The lockout has already caused the postponement of training camps. A handful of preseason games have already been canceled. Regular season games could be next. In a worst-case scenario, the season could be flushed down the drain entirely. If the season survives, even if it is a shortened one, Rondo believes the Celtics will benefit from the NBA lockout — it will leave less-experienced teams with less time to get familiar with each other.

“With our camaraderie and chemistry, I’m not worried about our timing and anything like that,” he explains. But you get the feeling he always expects his team to win, that he would highlight the positive effects of the NBA lockout regardless of the negative ones.

“We’ve played with each other for five years; that’s absolutely to our advantage,” he adds. But he forgets to mention that those five years mean his team is growing old, that increased back-to-backs (and even back-to-back-to-backs) caused by a lengthy lockout could leave the Celtics hobbling to the finish line like they have for the past two regular seasons, that the Miami Heat and Chicago Bulls are by now also very familiar with each other. Or maybe Rondo does not forget to mention that. Maybe his competitive nature blurs his vision of Boston’s immortality.

One of the league’s most selfless players on the court, known to occasionally forego wide open layups so his teammates can shoot jump shots, Rondo likes boxing, oddly enough, “because it’s just you and the other guy.” If I were psychoanalyzing, I would wonder if he wishes he could emerge from the shadows of his Big Three. I would wonder if comments like Mike D’Antoni’s — “I’d like to see him play in Minnesota and see how he does” — bother Rondo more than he lets on. For now, he plays like a man committed to being the pass-first point guard the Celtics need him to be. But the time will come when Rondo will lead this Celtics team into the future, when his accomplishments — even if they do now, which they shouldn’t — will not hold any asterisks at all.

“You’ve gotta be ready,” he says, and though he is describing what he learned from the playoff loss to Miami, he might as well be discussing his soon-to-change role. “I have a veteran team,” he says, but he might as well call his team old. He might as well admit the Celtics will soon be his.

Basketball won’t ever become boxing, just Rondo and the other guy. But it will become more like boxing when Rondo looks around the locker room and sees fewer Hall of Famers, when more pressure than ever rests in Rondo’s Texas-sized hands.

“I’m training as if we’re having a season, so I’m not worried about getting out of shape,” Rondo tells Dime. “The longer (the lockout) goes I might not be in the same condition I’d be if we were having games, but I’ll be in good enough shape to make it through.”

The Rajon Rondo era will come, one day. But next season will (hopefully) come first.

Rajon Rondo will reportedly compete in The South Florida All-Star Classic, a charity game at Florida International University on Oct. 8 at 7:00 p.m. hosted by Lebron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh. The F.I.U. basketball team is coached by none other than the greatest NBA executive of all-time, Isiah Thomas.

A number of NBA players are slated to join the Miami trio on the court, including fellow Heat teammate Mario Chalmers, the Oklahoma City Thunder’s Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook, the New York Knicks’ Carmelo Anthony, Amare Stoudemire, the New Orleans Hornets’ Chris Paul, the Washington Wizards’ John Wall, the Atlanta Hawks’ Jamal Crawford, the Houston Rockets’ Jonny Flynn, the Los Angeles Clippers’ Eric Bledsoe, the Dallas Mavericks’ Caron Butler, the Memphis Grizzlies’ Rudy Gay, the Boston Celtics’ Rajon Rondo, the Philadelphia 76ers’ Lou Williams, the Golden State Warriors’ Dorell Wright, and the Portland Trail Blazers’ Wesley Matthews and free agent Eddy Curry.

Cleveland Cavaliers first-round picks Kyrie Irving and Tristan Thompson also are possible participants in the game.

The squads will be headlined by Brand Jordan players (Wade, Anthony, Paul) vs. Nike (James, Bosh, Durant). Comedian Kevin Hart, who has appeared in Brand Jordan commercials with Wade, is expected to coach the Jordan team, while Miami-based rap star Rick Ross is expected to coach the Nike club.

If those players all compete like the game means something, this game has the chance to become legendary. Alas, players treat charity games like they are And1 Streetball games, so the game will probably be as watchable as Bucky Larson: Born to be a Star.

And please, don’t let Isiah Thomas meet Eddy Curry again. Looking at an overweight, excessively lazy center, Thomas may be struck by the desire to offer another $60 million contract. And that, my friends, would be against NCAA rules. Unless the recipient of the contract is Cam Newton.

Mostly due to the city’s history of racial inequality, partially due to cold and snowy winters, the Boston Celtics have never signed a truly significant free agent. Bill Russell, Bob Cousy, Larry Bird, Paul Pierce, John Havlicek, Dave Cowens, Kevin McHale — name a Celtics superstar and he was acquired via trade or through the draft.

The most important free agent signing in franchise history was probably Don Nelson; before he became a zany, successful and entirely unpredictable coach, Nelson was a key figure, albeit a role player, on five Celtics championship teams. But even Nelson came to Boston with little fanfare and few other options — the year before joining the Celtics, Nellie averaged 2.4 points per game for the Los Angeles Lakers. And with the Celtics, he never averaged more than 15.4 points, 27.4 minutes, or 7.3 rebounds. The most important free agent acquisition in the history of the NBA’s winningest franchise never made a single All-Star game.

But Boston’s free agent luck might be changing. According to Stephen Jackson, players are beginning to look at Boston differently than ever before.

“When I first got in the league, I would never have thought about Boston. Ever,” Jackson told ESPN the Magazine’s Ric Bucher. “The way they embraced KG was a big part of changing that.”

The Celtics also have a coach, and a black one at that, known for treating his players well. The Boston players begged Doc Rivers to stay every time rumors flew saying he might take a leave of absence, according to Bucher.

“That’s a big piece of it,” one agent told Bucher. “They’d run through a wall for him.”

As the Celtics attempt to transition from the Big Three era to the “Rondo and whoever else” era, becoming major players in the free agent market has never been more important. The Celtics currently have only three players under contract for the 2012-12 season. That means Danny Ainge will have millions of dollars to play with in the summer of 2012, but convincing Dwight Howard or any other marquee free agent to sign in Boston will mean erasing five decades worth of free agent whiffs. And if Ainge does fail to upgrade the team through free agency, the Celtics could begin a long rebuilding process, one that could revive painful memories of Ricky Davis, Gerald Green and Sebastian Telfair. Either that, or Ainge could settle for second-tier free agents and the Celtics could become mired in what I will call “The Antoine Walker Zone,” where the Celtics make the playoffs every year but never have a chance to contend for a championship.

In his piece, Bucher discussed the possibility of a Jeff Green-Paul Pierce-Rajon Rondo core.

“A nucleus of Green, Rondo and Pierce ‘is definitely a playoff team, especially in the East,’ says an Eastern Conference executive who spoke on a condition of anonymity because the league has a $1 million gag order on its employees during the current lockout,” wrote Bucher.

But the playoffs are not supposed to be the end, not for the Boston Celtics, winners of 17 championships, but the means to the end. The Celtics are supposed to fight for championships, not resign themselves to mediocrity. The Antoine Walker era produced many memorable moments — banked three-pointers to win games, a trip to the Eastern Conference Finals, shimmies and shakes galore– but the era that came after it, the Gerald Green era, was more beneficial to winning a title than anything Walker ever accomplished in Boston. With Walker, the Celtics were stuck in quick sand, not going anywhere fast, pretending to make moves that would result in a championship but never really inching any closer. But after gutting the team and rebuilding with young talent (err, if you can call it talent), the Celtics were able to trade assets, contracts and draft picks to acquire the Big Three and bring Boston its 17th title.

In the summer of 2012, when Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen become free agents, Danny Ainge might have a choice to make: sign second-tier free agents and maintain a semblance of competitive mediocrity, or gut the entire roster and attempt to rebuild through draft picks and trades.

Or maybe, if the Celtics get lucky, if Stephen Jackson’s sentiments are shared by the rest of the NBA, or at least by the marquee free agents of 2012, the Celtics could skip the rebuilding process and simply reload.

What say you, Dwight?

Paul Pierce reportedly committed to play in a pair of exhibition games next month in Mexico. The games will be hosted by Eduardo Najera, whose Wikipedia page says scouts “boasted about Najera’s quick first step” while he was in college. Presumably, said scouts have long since been fired.

The games will be hosted by Mexico native and Charlotte Bobcats forward Eduardo Najera. Organizers of the event said Tyson Chandler, Trevor Ariza, Marcus Camby, DeAndre Jordan, Corey Maggette, Jerryd Bayless and Ryan Hollins are among the other players who will participate in the games. Phoenix Suns point guard Steve Nash has also been invited to play.

Marc Spears also reported that Pierce will possibly travel to Mexico City on October 4, when a group of players are meeting Mexico President Felipe Calderon (no relationship to Jose, I don’t think) and businessman Carlos Slim Helu, considered the world’s richest man.

The exhibition games were hatched by Najera with the hope that the event will bring positive attention to a country battling a violent drug war. But if forgetting about drugs is the goal, I’m not sure why anyone invited Marcus Camby.

But the real story of this highlight tape is Josh McRoberts, who briefly became Vince Carter at the 0:59 mark. I don’t think I’m hallucinating, but then again, I also don’t think McBob is capable of doing a backwards 360 dunk equipped with a between-the-legs maneuver. In a game that sees Jeff Green pull down 12 rebounds, I guess anything is possible.