So presumably, overtime and overbooking of advertising time notwithstanding, the best, greatest, finest, mostest, baddest, have-you-ever, no-I-never segment of pro basketball’s postseason is over.

Great. Now, once we catch up on sleep, can we all get our minds back?

Full disclosure: I was guilty as every other drooling knucklehead for about 30 seconds Thursday night, declaring to those desperate enough to call me a Facebook friend that Celtics-Bulls was “the best NBA playoff series since the ’80s, at least.”

That qualifier, alone, is a mouthful, drizzled with sticky-sweet wisdom that even I must stop and admire. Millionaire basketball the last two decades, a smattering of Michael Jordan highlights excepted, has been an unwatchable monstrosity.

We’ve forgotten what great basketball was. Having to rank the Shaq and Kobe Lakers, Tim Duncan’s Spurs and the resurrected Celtics in historical terms forces us to grade on a steep curve. Labeling anything NBA-related the best we’ve seen since A Flock of Seagulls hit the Top 40 isn’t challenging or courageous.

Even armed with that knowledge, I’d like to let everyone’s vital signs return to normal, share a moment of clarity and call this frenetic fortnight what it was: A very, very, very good conference quarterfinal series.

Not a scintilla less, but positively nothing more.

Let’s examine the evidence instead of indulging the knee-jerk platitudes put forth by the blow-dried blowhards in the immediate afterglow of each game, shall we?

We’re in the NBA equivalent of the Sweet 16, folks. And nothing in the realm of professional sports amounts to a whit if a championship isn’t won. Truly great, unforgettable basketball moments must end with fans flooding a parquet floor and the sweat-soaked, cigar-chomping principals scissoring the nets for posterity.

It’s true in every other sport, too. Whose home run was truly bigger in Red Sox history, Bobby Kielty or Dave Henderson’s? And who’s the better quarterback, John Elway or Dan Marino?

The last game matters most, period. So the only way the Celtics or Bulls could retroactively bathe this series in immortality is to be showered in champagne six weeks from now. And the odds of that happening are Armageddon-to-one. Glenn Beck had a better chance of being named keynote speaker at Bates’ graduation.

Historical greatness requires two heavyweights at the absolute pinnacle of their games. All the overtime in the world couldn’t mask the shared mediocrity we watched in this seven-game set.

Your defending champions are a model of depletion. At full strength, they would have dispatched the Bulls more quickly and authoritatively than Andre the Giant shaking five midget wrestlers’ grip on his thigh, circa 1979.

The Celtics’ heart, soul and inspiration was relegated to wearing a 12-button suit while bellowing some variation of the F-word each of the 1,452 times a TNT, ESPN or Comcast camera locked on him.

Ray Allen and Paul Pierce, to their eternal credit, have looked Springfield-worthy in their efforts to cushion Kevin Garnett’s absence. Allen, in particular, occupies my heart in perpetuity along with Bird, McHale and the Chief for his brilliance in this series.

That doesn’t band-aid the harsh reality that Glen Davis and Brian Scalabrine were on the floor for every pivotal second of this series, immediately disqualifying it from a superlative of all-time, mythical proportions. Unless you count Greatest Threat to Danny Ainge’s Cardiac Recovery as a category.

Chicago, for all its spirit, youthful exuberance and limitless potential, are frighteningly erratic. Derrick Rose and Joakim Noah mix stupid with sensational in a way that would make the red awareness ribbon dyed in the back of Dennis Rodman’s head turn gray.

We saw two teams who know how to nurse a lead with all the efficiency of the Los Angeles Angels’ bullpen. They’re a reflection of the gritty, erstwhile guards and general good guys, Doc Rivers and Vinny Del Negro, who steer their ships. Neither is worthy to carry K.C. Jones’ or Phil Jackson’s dry-erase board.

Celtics-Bulls was the equivalent of an epic, five-set, five-hour Wimbledon quarterfinal, after which the winner received the death sentence of having to face Pete Sampras or Andre Agassi in the next round. The survivor is done for.

It was fun. It was grueling. It was drunk with drama.

It was two unspectacular, well-matched teams giving us something to occupy our time during Red Sox pitching changes. Let’s not go bazookas and rank it any higher than that.