PHILADELPHIA — This was early in the evening of Sunday, Oct. 17, 2004. Kevin Millar, the designated hitter for the Red Sox, was chatting on the field at Fenway Park with Dan Shaughnessy, longtime columnist for the Boston Globe. The Yankees had pummeled the Sox, 19-8, the night before, taken a 3-0 lead in the American League Championship Series.
Shaughnessy — like just about everyone else in New England — had already begun working on his farewell to the ’04 Sox.
“It’s embarrassing,” the writer told the player. “You guys are better than this.”
“Let me tell you,” Millar replied. “Don’t let us win today. We win, we got Petey [Pedro Martinez] tomorrow, and we got Schill [Curt Schilling] in Game 6. And Game 7, anything can happen. We can put you on second base, hitting ninth. Anything.”
Then he pounded his glove.
“Don’t … let … the Sox … win … this game …”
What happened next is something no baseball fan in New York or Boston will ever forget. The Yankees had the Red Sox buried in Game 4, up a run. Then Mariano Rivera walked Millar, Dave Roberts pinch ran for Millar, Roberts stole second …
“One bad thing led into another bad thing, and then another, and so on,” Joe Torre said in his office in Tampa the next spring. “If we figure out a way to tie a tourniquet around any one of those bad things, we win the series.”
What faced the Knicks and the Sixers on Thursday night wasn’t quite an equivalent replay of the dance the Red Sox and Yankees danced 20 years ago. The Sixers were down 1-3 in this one, not 0-3. Nobody before had ever rallied from 0-3 down in baseball before the ’04 Sox did; plenty of NBA teams have rebounded from 1-3 down (though to date, the 76ers never have).
But it’s hard not to look at the ninth inning of Game 4 in ’04 and the last half-minute of Game 5 on Wednesday and not see the similarities. The Yankees had Rivera on the mound, as close to a sure thing as there’s been in baseball ever. Roberts stole the base, quite literally, by a fraction of an inch, his fingers reaching second base and eye blink before Derek Jeter slapped a tag on him.
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The Yankees let the Sox win that game.
And then everything else happened.
The Knicks had a six-point lead with under 30 seconds to go. They were aided by a four-point play. Tyrese Maxey played the part of Big Papi, bringing the hammer down once the door was left ajar.
The Knicks let the Sixers win that game.
Thursday, the two teams resumed hostilities at Wells Fargo Center with the rest of the script of this best-of-seven first-round playoff series still to be authored. They could respond in Game 6 the way the 1994 Knicks responded in Game 6 against the Pacers, after losing the First Reggie Miller Game, Miller’s 25-point fourth quarter explosion in Game 5.
But there are other possibilities, too.
All still in play because the Knicks, like the ’04 Yankees, failed to nail the door shut when they had the chance.
“They’re going to be home, it’s going to be … obviously this place is going to be filled with so much excitement just from fans, and so for us to be ready for an environment like that, we have to do everything we can to not let our minds wander,” Jalen Brunson said Thursday morning. “And just got to be mentally locked in.”
Five months after issuing his warning to Shaughnessy and then delivering with his leadoff walk a few hours later, Millar sat in front of his locker at the Red Sox’ spring training facility in Fort Myers and fondly reminisced about the Sox’ great escape.
“Here’s the thing,” he said. “After we win that first game, OK, we saved the season but we’ve still got to win three more and it’s hard to beat a really good time four times in a row. But there came a time, in the next few days, when we started feeding off that success, got momentum, and by Game 7 it wasn’t close.”
The Knicks arrived at Wells Fargo last night hoping to nip all of that immediately, before history could even ponder repeating itself.
