No. 68: BOSTON GARDEN / At large in the unfriendly confines. On the night they closed the Beantown shrine I had to make like Whitey Bulger & go into hiding.

Deadline pressure is nothing compared to the prospect of being arrested. If the cops give you one phone call, are you wasting it to dictate your story to the copy desk?

As kid, long before I took my professional vow of objectivity, I was a fan of the Bruins and the Celtics. In the 60s and 70s, I watched hundreds of their home games, but only from afar. No matter, the Bruins’ victories there were a mix of spectacular skill and gothic violence, while the Celtics’ evoked sorcery, as if the parquet floor with its dead spots conspired with Red Auerbach against visiting teams. To my barely adolescent mind, the Boston Garden was a brutal and magical place.

(From the best-ever Boston crime flick, here’s Robert Mitchem as the titular small-time mobster alongside Peter Boyle in The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Tellingly, a couple of beers after admiring Bobby Orr from the Garden’s cheap seats, Mitchem gets a bullet in the head from Boyle.)