Who's hiding the real Celtics?

If we're going to have a real Celtics-Lakers rivalry revival, first we'll need some real Celtics.

Where are they?

Bill Russell is going on 75, Bob Cousy 80. John Havlicek hands out trophies to other people now. Don Nelson is five coaching jobs down the road from Boston. Red Auerbach's cigar has gone out and so has Red. Kevin McHale is the GM in Minnesota, though perhaps still helping the Celtics with favorable deals. Two decades have gone by since the great Greg Kite's finest NBA season (when he had more fouls than points).

Those were Celtics, tough, crafty, annoyingly clutch guys whom Auerbach praised for "the Celtic attitude," writers lauded for an iron will to win, and distracted opponents called cheaters and -- worse -- lucky. They were, above all, winners, the Celtics prevailing in the NBA Finals in 15 of their past 17 appearances. Winners by hook and by crook and by assault and battery upon the person of Kurt Rambis.

Today's men in green?

Kevin Garnett is in his 13th NBA season and has never been to the NBA Finals, not until the Celtics and Lakers open the series Thursday in Boston. Paul Pierce is in his 10th season, and this is his first NBA Finals. Ray Allen is in his 12th season, ditto. The Big Three. OK.

If we're looking for natural-born winners among the current Celtics, well, the closest things are Sam Cassell, who won two NBA titles with the Houston Rockets in the mid-1990s, and James Posey, who won one from the bench of the Miami Heat in 2006. By my count, the players on the Celtics roster have exactly 100 seasons under their belts and a total of three rings on their fingers. None of them won an NCAA title, either.

Look, I don't know these Celtics personally. They're nice players and I'm sure they're nice guys. Which is kind of the point. They don't inspire fear, or even loathing. Take away the shamrocks, you've got the Orlando Magic.

Of course, the Celtics faithful might fire back that this year's Lakers aren't true Lakers either, what with the absence of a Hall of Fame center, the uncharacteristic preseason self-doubt, and the thoroughly disappointing calm in the locker room.

But maybe that's the larger point about the championship series that's inspiring a coast-to-coast wave of nostalgia for the Lakers-Celtics wars of the 1960s and 1980s -- for Jack Kent Cooke's balloons and Don Nelson's fortunate bounce, for McHale's throwdown of Rambis and Magic Johnson's baby skyhook, for gruff Red and slick Pat Riley, for the hot-as-in-sexy Forum and the hot-as-in-hot Boston Garden, for Chick Hearn and Johnny Most.

Nothing about these Lakers and Celtics is the same as the Lakers and Celtics we knew and loved ... and hated.

Lakers coach Phil Jackson has a feel for the Lakers and Celtics of yore, having played for the New York Knicks who lost in the postseason to the champion Lakers of 1972 and Celts of 1974, so he knows what all this history means for the upcoming rematch of franchises that last met for the title in 1987.

"It doesn't mean anything now," Jackson said the other day. "The styles of basketball aren't the same, the philosophies, the players aren't the same.

"The crowds are still the same. Same type of people. Beantown is still Beantown. But I guess they've won a World Series now (with the Red Sox), so they're not so bedraggled."

Every way you look at it, these are not your father's and grandfather's Lakers and Celtics.

The Boston Garden is gone, replaced (yeah, right) by something called the TD Banknorth Garden. The Lakers have moved on from the Sports Arena and the Fabulous Forum to Staples Center. Yes, parts of the first four Celtics-L.A. Lakers finals were played at the then-sparkling Sports Arena. When Bob Cousy hurled the ball toward the rafters at the end of the clinching game 6 in 1963, they were the Sports Arena rafters. This will be the first Lakers-Celtics final to be held in soulless monuments to high ticket prices.

For those watching and listening at home, this will be the first Lakers-Celtics final not to be narrated by the great Chick Hearn and Johnny Most. Hearn was the Lakers announcer who invented pretty much every basketball expression known to America, and Most was the Celtics play-by-play man who (if the ESPN clips sum him up correctly) never said anything except "Havlicek stole the ball!"

The tighter NBA officiating won't allow this year's games to be played in the style of evolved mayhem that everybody loved in the '80s, when the McHale-Rambis collision inspired James Worthy to put Cornbread Maxwell into a basket support.

The demands of NBA merchandising have put the Lakers in white home uniforms on Sundays and the Celtics in black-trimmed third uniforms. Horrors! Next thing you know, the Raiders will play in chartreuse.

The keys to the franchises' resurgences are acquisitions, the Lakers' Pau Gasol and the Celtics' Garnett, who are too new to those uniforms to really feel the clubs' histories and cultures, Gasol having been 6 and KG 11 when the latest L.A.-Boston NBA Finals skirmishes were taking place in '87.

Yes, it's all too different to be the '60s and '80s again. The rivalry as it was is beyond reviving.

Which brings us to the largest point in all this: So what?

There wasn't a Lakers-Celtics rivalry when it began in 1962; it turned out to be historic. When it resumed in '84, there must have been a stupid columnist complaining that it would be nothing like the '60s; it turned out to be better.

What starts Thursday will not be old-school Lakers-Celtics. But, who knows, it might turn out to be new-school and the best yet.

I mean, when the Larry Bird generation of Celtics began, they hadn't won any titles either. Then again, they didn't have years of failure behind them like Garnett, Pierce and Allen.