Finally!

No, that isn’t premature exultation on behalf of the Celtics.

They will win, be it Sunday or Tuesday or Thursday, the latter preferable to at least one 10-year-old I know who is serving his final week of snow make-up days and would love to watch it unfold live.

It was inevitable, someday, that Johnny Most and Red Auerbach would sell their souls to the head honcho on whichever side of the pearly gates they’re encamped and make this happen.

The preeminent professional basketball franchise in history was destined to win additional titles in your lifetime and mine, whether by shrewd management or dumb luck. Tough to get overly jazzed about that.

What inspires me to a state of blissful intoxication that ought to carry straight through the summer and fall ’til snow flies or Santa comes isn’t the impending immortality of the winner. It’s the repudiation of the loser – namely, their self-appointed face, voice and conscience -forever.

Kobe Bryant and his soulless game have been stripped for an international audience and exposed for what they are: Fit for enshrinement in the Hall of Not Bad. And it’s about doggone time.

There are more overrated athletes on the planet, although Brett Favre, Chipper Jones, Maria Sharapova and Michelle Wie need at least to scrunch together and make room at the table for Bryant.

But no, not one baller with a double-digit number of zeroes in his net worth has seen more unmerited greatness ascribed to his stand-alone first name than Kobe.

To suggest that Bryant belongs on a first or second team of all-stars covering the history of the Association is like starting a petition to carve Jimmy Carter’s face as the fifth likeness upon Mount Rushmore.

Bryant is blindly deified far and wide by a suck-up media too bored by Tim Duncan’s greatness to see the glaring deficiencies in their Hollywood man crush. Let us hope Bryant’s final foray into the NBA Finals on the serviceable side of age 30 peels the rotten layers off that myth forever.

How many times is an alleged legend allowed to go 6-for-19 or 9-for-26 and slough off defensively in the only spotlight that matters? Eventually, his apologists should stop insulting our intelligence and quit sullying the memory of his predecessors who embody true greatness.

The comparisons to Michael Jordan are so absurd as to be laughable. Bryant doesn’t deserve to be in the same wing of Springfield with Larry Bird or Magic Johnson, either.

Kobe carries a team the way Ashlee Simpson carries a tune – with proper accompaniment. Just as Bill Parcells never won a blessed thing without Bill Belichick, subtracting Shaquille O’Neal, the only jewelry adorning Bryant’s digits would be that troublesome wedding band.

Dominique Part II ran Diesel out of town because he couldn’t stomach sharing the marquee. When the franchise surrounded him with the decoys and lapdogs that enabled him to experience the joy of scoring 81 points for a .500 team, he used his tape recorder-wielding lackeys in Los Angeles to express his desire for a trade 6,291 times.

Somewhere along the way, Bryant’s former/future/current boss famously labeled him “uncoachable.” Like most sports autobiographers, I’m sure Phil Jackson now insists he was misquoted.

Rather than acquiesce to the trade demands of its lone marketable commodity, the Lakers surrounded Bryant with the best team you can buy without a prescription and without a commissioner invoking a best-interests-of-the-game clause.

The supposed missing pieces, Pau Gasol and Lamar Odom, continue to play scared. More frightened of Bryant’s wrath than the glare of the Finals, I suspect. They stand powerless as Bryant remains a brick waiting to happen when leadership or a clutch shot is needed most.

Neither Kevin Garnett nor Ray Allen could have coexisted with Bryant for a week. That’s probably why they’re both in Boston, about to drown in ticker tape and reward Paul Pierce for a decade of shutting his mouth and being the Anti-Kobe.

Sure, Bryant might score 45 tonight and keep his team alive.

One cross-country plane flight later, watch him disappear. Enjoy the desperation in his eyes. Bask in the glow of fraudulent greatness being laid bare.

Forever. Finally.

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