It's gotta come from somewhere

In my dresser at my parents house I have the most comfortable shirt in the history of apparel.

It's a 1986-87 Boston Celtics Eastern Conference Championship shirt; twenty years old at this point and every bit as ragged as you would imagine. It belonged to my mother, then my sister and now me - a gift from the patriarch of our little clan.

My father has always had an unholy love for California even though he was born and raised in the cornfields of rural Illinois, but even his loyalty to the sun and surf meant nothing in the face of the Great White Hope. Our house in Long Beach was proudly green.

Basketball was the only sport my father watched with any regularity and as his daughter, I naturally picked up on his idiosyncrasies. So it says a lot that the only two teams I knew existed were the Celtics and the Lakers; and that, as a four year old girl with no real interest in the game herself, I could still pick Larry Bird and Magic Johnson out of a crowd.

The '86-87 NBA Finals were a big deal in our home. My father would skip church some mornings and be in a foul mood the rest of the day when Boston would lose. I grew up thinking Larry Bird was the closest thing to godhood we mere mortals would ever see. For all I knew, they were slipping something in the water over in Boston that made their young men superhuman on the court. In the Merriman household, the Celtics could do no wrong.

Obviously I grew up and the Celtics tanked. We moved to Phoenix and Westphal took Barkley to the finals in '92-93; I officially became a Suns fan.

Still there's a lingering fondness and the four year old inside of me is incredibly excited by the Lakers/Celtics match-up this season. There's no McHale, Johnson (Denis OR Magic) and certainly no Bird - and I've not kept up with either team, except to say I dislike Kobe's grandstanding and the outside drama he brings to the court. But I'm going home tonight to eat pizza with my father and I'll listen to him exclaim in genuine shock when he spots an old-timer or when they play classic footage he remembers; and I'm honestly looking forward to it.

Tonight I'll wear my twenty-year-old t-shirt from a city I've never been to, promoting a team I've never really liked.

Should be a good time.