The Celtics, conversely, weren’t fast or smooth. And Boston, with its working-class reputation, was kind of a dump in the 1980s. They played in the Boston Garden, which had been built in the 1920s and didn’t even have air conditioning. The Celtics neither had cheerleaders nor a sea of recognizable fans. “The Lakers were a very showy team,” my dad explains. “The Celtics were like a lunch-bucket group.” (I didn’t know what a lunch-bucket worker was, so I looked it up: Thesaurus.com says it’s a “common laborer.” Dads. They teach you things.)

Boston fans didn't like this new approach to basketball. In the Boston Garden, my father says, fans were serious about basketball, not about all the extra entertainment. There were no kiss cams or jumbotrons or hot-dog cannons. “Back then, people came for the basketball,” he says. “They didn’t come to win a free T-shirt.” That meant fans were more engaged in the game, more knowledgeable about the players, and, therefore, knew what would happen if the 76ers beat the Celtics, which is they would play the Lakers in the Finals.

Celtics fans respected the 76ers, with whom they also had an intense rivalry in the 1980s. They certainly respected them more than they did the showoff Lakers. After all, the Celtics came back from a 3–1 series deficit in 1981 to beat the 76ers and go on to win the NBA championship. The 76ers, like the Celtics, were an East Coast team, with players like Julius “Dr. J” Erving and Andrew Toney, who was known as “The Boston Strangler” since the Celtics were terrible at defending him.

More than anything, Celtics fans abhorred the “Showtime” Lakers and wanted them to lose, no matter the cost. So my dad, standing in the balcony with his friends, thinking about how much he disliked the Lakers, started chanting: “Beat L.A.! Beat L.A.!” Other fans followed. The Garden turned from a place of funereal silence to one united by a loud, synchronous chant. Darryl Dawkins, a 76ers player, reportedly told the Boston Globe columnist Bob Ryan, “When I heard that, my dick got stiff.” My dad did that!*

Now, I would not peg my father as much of a chanter. Growing up going to Red Sox games, I’m not sure I ever heard him chant the now-ubiquitous “Yankees suck!” But, he insists, he was a chanter then. Everyone was. “You can’t understand how passionate the fans were back then,” he told me. “People don’t do that now. They just get lots of food and try to get seen on the kiss cam.” It probably helped that there were all sorts of bench-clearing brawls to capture fans’ attention. And that the Celtics had been absolutely dreadful in 1978 and 1979 and, all of a sudden, they were good again? Well, fans get giddy when they are pleasantly surprised.

As a dutiful journalist, I tried to corroborate my father’s account. I wanted to start with his two friends who were at the May 23, 1982, game with him. They were Richie and Bob Weintraub, family friends who shared season tickets with him until the Boston Garden was torn down and replaced by the Fleet Center (now known as TD Garden), which had far too many jumbotrons and T-shirt cannons for their taste.