Two weeks ago, Orlando coach Doc Rivers stood in a hallway outside his team's locker room at the FleetCenter in Boston. Never has a man looked so relieved to have just lost a game by 20 points or to have watched his team surrender 130 points.

That's because Rivers knew what was ahead. That 130-110 loss to the Celtics had been the Magic's seventh consecutive road game -- all against Eastern Conference opponents. (You're free to check in to see when that last happened. When you find out, call the folks at Ripley's.) It had been the team's second game in as many nights and third in four nights. Rivers had been shorthanded that night as it was (no Horace Grant) and, basically, he put a 34-cent stamp on that game and dropped it in the nearest mailbox sometime in the third quarter.

	Tracy McGrady has Orlando playoff-bound without Grant Hill and Mike Miller.

"Our season starts in two days," he said confidently after the blowout loss. "We're going to be all right."

He knew that the Magic had 21 games to play -- and that 14 of them were at home. He knew that of those 21 games, only three were against Western Conference teams and all of those teams (Phoenix, Denver and Houston) were Secaucus-bound. He knew the team's longest road trip over the final six weeks was a solo visit to Milwaukee, to match wits with his favorite colleague, George Karl. He knew his team was still above the waterline, barely, at 31-30.

In the two weeks since that debacle in Boston, Rivers has had five postgame news conferences, and not one of them has had to deal with the topic of defeat. True to his word and prediction, the Magic survived their Grapes of Wrath tour and lived to tell about it. They strung together four straight wins at home and then went into Philadelphia on St. Patrick's Day and edged the Sixers on a game-winner by Notre Dame alum Pat Garrity.

Orlando's five-game winning streak is its longest of the season, and the timing, as Rivers suspected, is perfect. The team has home games this week with the Bucks and the Hornets as it sets its sights on one of the top four spots in the conference and the home-court advantage that goes with it.

The Magic have done it with Tracy McGrady at full bore (31.3 points, 10 assists, 7.7 rebounds last week) and, surprisingly, with Mike Miller on the injured list with a sprained ankle. Miller went down in the first game of Orlando's new season and hasn't been back. That is what makes this surge even more impressive, given that Miller is the team's second leading scorer and, well, Orlando doesn't exactly win games with its defense. The Magic need scoring -- they are third overall and No. 1 in the East in points per game -- and they're still getting it even without Miller's 15.8 points a game, averaging almost 108 points per game during their streak.

"We're fighting everyone in the East," Rivers said after the Sixers game. "Every win right now is great. I told our guys, we might be exhausted by playoff fighting to get in. It is a really nice character win. Not having Mike Miller here and still winning games is really good."

The only thing that would be better would be for Grant Hill to show up at practice this week and say he's ready to go. That's not going to happen, but then again, the Magic long ago got used to playing without Hill and riding McGrady like the thoroughbred he has become.

Orlando is like a lot of other teams in the East -- small, perimeter-strong, outside-inside oriented and capable of looking very good one night and very bad the next. In a five-day stretch in December, they went 3-0 and won the games by margins of 42, 28 and 35 points. They beat Dallas by 26. They've also surrendered 112 points in a 17-point loss to offensively challenged Miami, not to mention the 130 they allowed against the Celtics.

	The fact that we're talking about Orlando and home-court advantage, given what has transpired this season, is, in itself, a tribute to Rivers and his players.

They have one of the elite players in the league in McGrady and a cast of sharpshooters who can kill you from long distance. Troy Hudson has made a late run for Sixth Man Award, averaging 18.4 points a game during the winning streak, including a 34-point, where-did-that-come-from? explosion against the Suns. He hasn't made Rivers say 'Mike Who?' yet, but prior to the streak he was averaging 10 points a game.

Orlando peruses the landscape in the Third World Eastern Conference and sees no one who particularly scares it (a similar feeling for every team, by the way.) The four teams ahead of the Magic -- New Jersey, Boston, Milwaukee and Detroit -- all have their warts. Milwaukee and Boston are, like Orlando, heavily dependent on 3-point shooting and lacking any kind of interior presence. The Pistons like to fire it up as well but have been known to stop teams every now and then. Same with the Nets.

Alas, the Magic also allow more points per game than any team in the East. As Rivers knows as well as anyone, that is not a statistic that bodes well for playoff success (although Dallas is last in the league in points allowed.) You can win -- and lose -- shootouts during the season, but those kinds of games tend to disappear when the playoffs start and teams have only one opponent on which to focus.

But the fact that we're talking about Orlando and home-court advantage, given what has transpired this season, is, in itself, a tribute to Rivers and his players. They lost Hill after only 14 games. They traded a popular, valuable player in Bo Outlaw (back when they thought there was still a chance that Hill might play) and, basically, got little in return other than roster space. They like the fact that Old Paint Patrick Ewing still works hard at practice, even though there's very little left in his game.

They are gearing up for another run at Tim Duncan next summer, but until then, there's plenty of basketball to be played. At this point, no one in the East is playing it any better than Orlando, which is sort of what Rivers had hoped when his team finally got around to those last 21 games. He knows the postseason will be different, the competition even more intense, and success almost entirely dependent on matchups.

But you've got to get there first, and the Magic are going in style right now. Rivers was correct. It looks like his team is going to be all right.

Peter May, who covers the NBA for the Boston Globe, is a regular contributor to ESPN.com.