This, kids, is how it should be.

Depression set in two summers ago, when it occurred to me that an entire generation of New England sports sufferers had graduated from crib to rocking horse to sandbox to Shrek to Little League to PlayStation to awkward first date to Adam Vinatieri and Big Papi to college applications to American Idol to love and/or marriage, all without the Boston Celtics once being remotely relevant.

I know, big revelation there. It was, however, one of those cold realities that had a way of sneaking up on you, like the tax deadline and creeping obesity. Denial takes its sweet time to grab a foothold when you’re a 1980s anachronism who swears the decade of Pac-Man and perestroika ended just yesterday.

Then comes the realization that even allegedly ardent basketball yahoos your own age worship at the altar of Kobe Bryant, LeBron James or Tim Duncan and think of Larry Bird, Kevin McHale and Danny Ainge as mediocre management. Or that they associate Robert Parish more strongly with reefer than rebounds. Or that they “forgot what a great player Dennis Johnson was” until they reviewed the resume in his obituary.

That half-lifetime (so far) of hammering our collective head against a concrete basket stanchion appeared to end in hardwood hell last summer, when the Portland Trail Blazers and Seattle/Oklahoma City/Las Vegas/Shanghai SuperSonics bartered with the draft lottery gods and earned the right to pluck Greg “Can’t Miss” Oden and Kevin “Doesn’t Miss” Durant, respectively. The Celtics were sentenced to the No. 5 pick, which equaled inevitable aimless Ainge darts-at-a-board dealing (“Ray ‘Bad Word That Begins With the Sixth Letter of the Alphabet’ Allen?” was my initial reaction) and permanent laughingstock status.

Go ahead, tell me you expected the rumored Kevin Garnett trade to fall into place, or more miraculously, that there would be enough basketballs for him to share with Allen and Paul Pierce and make the Triplets experiment work. Swear that you were on board before the Green went 8-0 or 29-3. Bluster without blinking that you saw 66 wins and a reason to have a refrigerator full of Sam Adams to entertain the gang on the third Sunday night in April, when your top-seeded Celtics would be hosting the mildly improved Atlanta Hawks in the Eastern Conference playoffs.

You lie, but I forgive. Easy to smile when all is right with the world.

Why does it matter that the Celtics matter? Because – and this is the part that the whippersnappers on the wrong side of the generation chasm can’t comprehend – is that if you were born between 1950 and 1975, the Celtics were the only thing that mattered.

Sincere apologies to Bobby Orr and Phil Esposito, but hockey was no less a niche sport then than now.

The Red Sox, with the gut-wrenching exceptions of 1967, 1975, 1978 and 1986, were wretched. Hard to imagine, but the first time a svelte and chemical-free Roger Clemens struck out 20 batters in a game, most of us missed it because we were watching a Celtics playoff game.

And the Patriots, non-existent; first literally, then figuratively, as decades of mismanagement sabotaged their fleeting flirtations with significance. Why else did you think there were so many local Giants fans digging their ill-fitting hoodies out of mothballs in February?

Thirty NBA seasons were contested between 1957 and 1986. Sixteen of them ended with Red Auerbach and Johnny Most puffing rings of cigar smoke to the Boston Garden rafters and the Celtics hoisting a world championship trophy. That’s one-six, y’all, as in more than 50 percent. That will never, ever, no, neigh, never happen again in any professional sport as long as our great-great-great-great-grandchildren shall live.

Next time some slicked-back buffoon arguing for argument’s sake on a cable morning show tries to pass off the 1990s Chicago Bulls, the Zero Decade’s San Antonio Spurs or even the Patriots as a “dynasty,” reread that last paragraph and laugh until you pop a blood vessel.

We can debate what happened next until Larry, Kevin and The Chief walk through that door just to spite Rick Pitino. New England fans love imaginary curses that absolve the teams they love of responsibility for their failures, so many of them cite the deaths of Len Bias and Reggie Lewis as evidence of one.

In the real world, the Celtics were sidetracked by loyalty and complacency. Bird, McHale and Parish got old, quickly, and the front office didn’t have a soulless Bill Belichick type to sweep them off the deck.

The game itself changed, too, for better or worse. With fundamentals in shorter supply, the formula for winning a championship was to draft or obtain a superstar and surround him with veterans or international players who understood how the game should be played beneath the rim. Deprived in 1997 of the chance to draft Duncan by another lottery-day disaster, the Celtics sputtered along with flashes of me-first brilliance from Pierce and Antoine Walker, hidden deep within the pucker brush of an otherwise dreadful decade.

Tonight, it starts to change. Sixty-six was a nice number, but the Celtics were never a franchise defined by November to March. Springtime was our divinely ordained time to shine.

Let all creation sing in perfect harmony. And may a deprived generation see how it’s done.

Kalle Oakes is a staff writer. His e-mail is [email protected].