EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. -- The Boston Celtics clutch Bob Cousy's heart and history, the franchise's rise out of the rubble restoring rightful order to his Memorial Day Weekend. From his Worcester, Mass., home, he's making the short drive down the Mass Turnpike bound for the gymnasium with 16 championship banners, with Red and Russell sitting within the screaming sellout.

	Bob Cousy was blessed with great peripheral vision, just like a certain Nets point guard.

These are old times for the Cooz, bringing him back 50 years to when the game's greatest dynasty was born with him bringing the ball down the court. Between his legs and around his back, Cousy passed to Havlicek and Bird, to Pierce and Walker, to Games 3 and 4 of these Eastern Conference finals at the Fleet Center.

"As a 73-year-old, it isn't easy to get animated anymore, but this team has got my attention," Cousy said the other day. "This Celtics team has got my blood flowing."

As hard as Cousy roots for them, as badly as he wishes for that Lakers-Celtics NBA Finals, the means to Boston's ends leave him a little torn, a little longing for the old days. The Celtics are working relentlessly to strip the beauty out of this basketball, slow these games to an unwatchable grind and make the Game 2 thud, thud, thud of 117 missed shots the soundtrack of this series.

If the Celtics must make everything so murky for victory, so be it. But why does everyone play this way now? Cousy doesn't love his basketball down and dirty, but fast and furious. There was a time Cousy never could've imagined thinking this way, but it's true and he believes it and so: Why can't a little of the ne'er-do-well New Jersey Nets rub off on the rest of basketball -- even the Celtics?

"When we were winning our championships, we had six plays with two options on each one," Cousy said. "Red loved it if I never called a set play the whole 48 minutes because that meant we blew someone's doors off in the transition game. With the sustained intensity of the defense in the playoffs, you can stop any half-court offense with fairly even matched teams. But it doesn't matter if the Celtics spend three weeks working on stopping the Nets, if you've got Jason Kidd running, you're never going to stop them. Never.

"I'm not talking the kind of running in the school yard and All-Star Games. I'm talking about a controlled running -- what just four or five teams out of everyone in the league do."

He sighs over the telephone, wishing this wasn't the case. The Celtics are clearly his heritage, but Kidd and these Nets, they're the living, breathing legacy of the way those old Celtics played the game. From fast breaks and scoring balance, to the backdoor layups out of that Princeton passing offense Pete Carril borrowed liberally from Auerbach, to the planet's best point guard playing the position like Cousy invented it, these Nets are a throwback.

When they're crisp, they're a clinic. When Kidd has the Nets running, they play a brand of basketball determined to bring a tear to a great old point guard's eye.

	“	It's complete crap that you can't run in the playoffs. You can develop that style. The Nets have done it. ”
		— Bob Cousy

"It's complete crap that you can't run in the playoffs," Cousy said. "You can develop that style. The Nets have done it. Everyone else will walk that sucker up the floor. If we all agree the players just don't pass that well today, then what's to say if they're going to pass the ball five or six times to get a shot that they're not going to screw things up even more?"

"I'll go to my grave not understanding why basketball has come to this. Has the game passed me by that much? Has it? Well, I don't believe it has."

Kidd is responsible for turning the biggest joke in basketball into something scintillating. And when he speaks of his influences, always two names tumble out of him: Magic Johnson and Cousy. They played that right way, Kidd believes. They played for everyone else. They played for winning's sake.

Cousy doesn't watch much regular-season basketball these days -- "Guys mail it in too often," he says -- but he watches Kidd when he gets the chance. He never takes his eyes off him. Sometimes, he hopes the young players are watching him, too, understanding a point guard can completely control the game even when shooting is the last thing on his mind. This was true a half century ago and it's true today.

"He's a throwback," Cousy said of Kidd. "He's out there creating and developing for other people. He makes everyone else around him better and there's no highest compliment to what we're all about. Not too many function anymore as such. I was blessed with peripheral vision, just like Jason and Magic, and that's a tremendous advantage."

There goes the Cooz, using "We" when he speaks of the New Jersey Nets before making his way to the FleetCenter this weekend. Yes, Cousy always had that great vision on the floor and he's never lost it. He's always going to go with his love, his history, and cheer that team of his that's made his Memorial Day weekend matter again. Yet, Bob Cousy longs for something beyond the glory of the Celtics -- the glory of the game -- and so it truly won't be old times in Boston until Jason Kidd brings his team to town, until they're running right out of those 1950s and 60s, and right into the heart of an old point guard.

Adrian Wojnarowski, a sports columnist for The Record (northern N.J.), is a regular contributor to ESPN.com.