Danny Ainge was quick with the humor when he emerged from the Celtics’ draft night bunker after midnight. Perhaps he was just decompressing a bit from a dizzy night of picks and trades, but I tend to believe there is more to it.

He was asked if it’s fair to say there is less clarity with the roster this offseason than last. It was a fishing expedition, with media folk trying to get Ainge to talk as much as he could about things he is not allowed to directly acknowledge. Kyrie Irving and Al Horford are all but officially gone, the latter because there is a better deal to be had on a team closer to contending, the former because, well, he’s Kyrie Irving.

If not necessarily rebuilding from the ground up, there is certainly scaffolding surround the Celts.

“Absolutely,” said Ainge through a grin. “Yes. Less clarity.”

Later, after a series of generally successful parries with the press, he stopped on the way back to the inner sanctum at the Auerbach Center. And he looked pretty damn relieved for a guy who’s staring at a mountain of work. Danny Ainge has more than seven days to re-create the Celtics, but with start free agency bearing down on him, the larger part of his task can’t take much longer.

And he seems OK with that — legitimately. No doubt he’d rather, as he was at this time last year, be looking at a roster equipped to contend for an NBA championship. But methinks the president of basketball operations is comforted to be back in the basketball business, having pretty much ended his foray into psychiatry necessitated by the way last season’s talent devolved into toxicity.

“I don’t know what our team’s going to be yet this year, but I like what we have,” Ainge told the Herald. “I like the pieces that we have. I like the trade potential that we have, the free agent potential that we have.

“We have some pieces to move, some real good assets and draft picks. So I’m hopeful for a big year.”

He seems pleased to know his new team, whatever its composition, will understand that it has to work for everything, that it will have to overcome lowered expectations.

“You know, everybody was anointing us, but I wasn’t comfortable with that,” Ainge went on. “I didn’t see things that way. I mean, I did respect those other teams — Milwaukee and Toronto and Philadelphia — and I knew it was going to be really tough for us to get to the NBA Finals. But I remained very hopeful that it was possible, and I had that hope up until maybe Game 4 or Game 5 against Milwaukee. Then it just sort of collapsed.”

He shook his head.

“Right before the trade deadline last year, like, we were playing really well. We won 10 out of 11 games. You know,” Ainge said, “we had these stretches that gave us more hope and where things were going better. But that resolve and that fight collectively, when things got really tough, went away.

“Milwaukee was really good, and they were a very together team. That’s the team that we have been the last five or six years. Like, we’ve been one of those teams, and this year we were not — and we will be next year.”

His coach is certainly hoping such is the case.

Earlier Thursday night, Brad Stevens acknowledged the monster in the rear view mirror as he looked ahead.

“Yeah, I mean, I think that everything is an opportunity,” he said. “And it’s been pretty well documented how this year went and, you know, how in the moment it was pretty disappointing, and it was something that we all would say we’re disappointed by.

“You know, I think if I take a step back and look at it from a big picture standpoint, you say, ‘OK, the last three years we’ve been [to] a couple of Eastern Conference finals and a second round,’ it wouldn’t feel as bad. But obviously the way this particular year went didn’t feel good. But that said, because of the great work that our front office has done over the years, even when we’re in a position where we’ll have some uncertainty as we move forward, you know, we’re in pretty good shape.

“So I think that obviously these are new opportunities, an opportunity to really evaluate where we are, what we need to do and everything else. And we feel good about our foundation and want to learn from certainly the disappointment that we all shared, but also we’re optimistic and positive as we look towards the future. That’s been the whole vibe in the building.”

But, Stevens added, “You know, I certainly understand why it may not be on the outside.”

He joked about the time it would take to properly respond to a question about what he’d learned from the past season.

“There’s a lot,” he said. “And I don’t think it’s anything that you wouldn’t have known prior to coming into the year. But sometimes when you go through steps, you can go through and look at each part of the year and say, ‘What could all of us have done differently? What could I have done differently?’ You know, I’ve thoroughly vetted myself and thoroughly vetted what I think we could have done better. That said, the competition is great, and the teams that were ahead of us at the end of the year deserved to be. They were better than us. So our task and our goal is to get better.”

It’s a task with a timeline that may try the patience of Greenhearts who’d seen their team dumped weeks before the altar of June. But Ainge seems good with a job description that doesn’t include putting out locker room fires.

“No, this is fun,” he said. “We’re prepared for this. We knew that what is before us coming into July was very possible, and we’re prepared.”