Ron Borges

BOSTON - On a miserable, snowy night in Boston, the Celtics hurt themselves by playing brilliantly. That's the kind of season it's been for them.

When you are 25 games below .500 and your season is already long gone it's difficult to find a Big Game but the Celtics managed to do it. Big is a relative term when you're 13-38 and have nothing to look forward to but losing Stupor Bowl I and Stupor Bowl II, of course, so you take your Big Games where you find them and Wednesday night the Celtics found themselves in one against a team nearly as inept as they are, the Milwaukee Bucks (19-34). Unfortunately for them, they stopped the Bucks here.

Although no games loom larger any more for the Celtics than the March 30 and April 11 Stupor Bowl showdowns with the almost as incompetent Philadelphia 76ers, who along with the Memphis Grizzlies are the Celtics' chief competition for the most lottery balls in the air at the May 22nd for the No. 1 pick, Wednesday night remained a potentially memorable moment in Boston basketball history. If the Celtics could just lose to the Bucks and hence push their personal losing streak to 19 straight, it all but guaranteed they would soon be on the cusp of historical ignominy.

Following this game with the Bucks, the Celtics would come out of the All-Star break and embark on a deadly West Coast road swing that would take them to Sacramento, Phoenix (why bother?), Los Angeles to play the Lakers, Utah and Houston. The odds of them winning any of those games would be longer than Yao Ming's inseam, to be kind, and so if they could avoid beating the struggling Bucks the Celtics had a more than reasonable shot at becoming the first team in NBA history to lose 24 games in a row in a single season. Immortality was beckoning, one way or another.

More importantly, the Celtics would have also have continued to protect their slim lead in the only race they have a chance to win this season — the one for the most lottery balls in the Greg Oden/Kevin Durant Sweepstakes. But they couldn't even do that right.

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Instead of losing when they needed to, the Celts hammered the Bucks, winning 117-97, by drilling home 15 three-pointers and keeping recovering Paul Pierce in the game for 36 minutes, during which he produced 32 points. They played for this night like something they are not. They played like a good team.

This led a loyal following of 14,482 to cheer him madly when what they should have been was simply mad because with that win the Celtics almost lost control of overall last place, and hence the most lottery balls, to the Grizzlies, who had the good sense to lose Wednesday night as the Celtics were winning.

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It is not often that breaking a 18-game losing streak would be considered a step backwards and certainly the Celtics' players didn't see it that way. Before the game, Pierce called the game "a must win'' and Ryan Gomes agreed. The latter's reasoning was that it was their last best chance to go down in the record books for going down more times in a row in one season than any team in NBA history.

"Look at the Western Conference,'' Gomes said before the win over the Bucks. "We've lost to four of those teams already and we haven't played Houston.''

That was not to be taken as a surrender speech but it wasn't exactly Winston Churchill's "We will fight them on the beaches'' declaration during World War II either. As Gomes knew, the simple fact was if the Celtics didn't beat the Bucks on their home court a night after Milwaukee lost at home their short-term destiny was clear.

"It feels good to get one knowing that we could easily be in that other zone for most losses,'' Pierce said with a sense of relief in his voice and even his coach, Doc Rivers, echoed the emotion.

"It's nice to see them take that monkey off each other's backs,'' Rivers said. "It's just a relief to win a game. It was a hellish streak.''