By BILL REYNOLDS, The Providence Journal

So now it's happened, the football unthinkable. New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady is out for the year with a knee injury. The sky has fallen Everything has changed.

You might not be able to dunk like Kevin Garnett, or shoot like Ray Allen, or take the ball to the basket like Paul Pierce, but that doesn't mean we can't learn some lessons from the NBA champion Boston Celtics. -- TRUST

BOSTON -- It really was a blowout game, the Boston Celtics in total control in the fourth quarter, up 20 with about seven minutes remaining, and the Los Angeles Lakers playing liked they couldn't wait to get on the plane and go back to Marina Del Ray.

BOSTON -- Can the Boston Celtics contain KobeBryant? That is the key question that hovers over this series. Can the Celtics contain Kobe, or is this NBA Finals going to turn out to be the Kobe Bryant Invitational, a showcase for all his basketball gifts, like the earlier rounds for the Los Angeles Lakers were.

BOSTON -- It has become the NBA version of sacred ground. Home court. Defend it, or it will come back to haunt you. Defend it, or it will exact its pound of flesh.

We knew it was going to end eventually, knew that one night some team was going to come in here and battle the crowd and the noise, the refs and those old Garden ghosts and beat the Boston Celtics.We knew it was inevitable, just a matter of time.

BOSTON -- Once they were the "Bad Boys," the first team to bring in-your-face, blue-collar defense to the NBA. The names were Isiah Thomas and Joe Dumars, Bill Laimbeer and Dennis Rodman, and the style was lunch pail and hard hat, as tough as working on the line in the automobile factories Detroit was built on.

BOSTON -- He has long been a curious player in Boston Celtics history; the great scorer whose fate it was to be on too many teams that went nowhere. The great player in the wrong era, as if it was his fate to forever play in too many games that didn't really count, too many games that slipped away into the mists of time. Until Sunday.

BOSTON -- Wednesday night was Game Five. Basketball dij` vu. It was just two weeks ago that the Boston Celtics had been in the same game with the upstart Atlanta Hawks, back when that series was inexplicably tied, 2-2, and the Celtics went into that game as if the sky was falling. So it was again on this night. Only it was different, too.

Winning on the road is not easy in basketball. Not in college, not in high school, not on someone else's playground. But winning on the road in the NBA playoffs has become like beating the IRS in an audit. So why is it so difficult when the court dimensions are the same and the baskets are still 10 feet off the floor?