Chapter 115 - Media Day

The banners hanging from the rafters of the TD Garden weren't just fabric; they were monuments to ghosts. Seventeen of them, great green and white declarations of dominance, each one a weight of expectation, a chapter in a legacy that every player who donned the green was expected to understand and advance. The cloth of the oldest was faded, the lettering a little less bold, like the memory of the men who had won it. But it was the eighteenth banner—the one added just a few months ago, the one that still felt like it belonged to the present—that drew every eye. Its stitching was fresh and sharp, the fabric still stiff, refusing to droop with the ease of its elders. It hung there not like a trophy, but like a scar that hadn't yet softened with time, a brilliant, painful reminder of a victory that now felt a lifetime away to the young man who had helped win it.