For most people associated with the New York Yankees, Boston – Fenway Park, in particular – is enemy territory.

But for Suzyn Waldman, one of baseball’s most iconic voices as a longtime member of the Yankees’ broadcasting team, it’s still home. The Yankees mainstay was born in Newton and graduated from Simmons College with a degree in economics. That the school was a stone’s throw from the cathedral she lovingly described to the New York Times as “a little green jewelry box” in 1993 wasn’t the deciding factor, but it certainly helped.

“I went to Simmons because my mother went to Simmons,” Waldman told the Herald on Sunday. “I was a special student at the New England Conservatory of Music, and I was doing shows at MIT and Harvard, and also, it was across the street from Fenway Park.”

She managed to juggle academics, performing, and a heavy extracurricular schedule: the Red Sox’s. “I just went every day to Fenway Park. I went every day in ‘67, sat in the bleachers,” she said.

Waldman then moved to New York to pursue a career in theater. But in hindsight, the baseball gods were sending her signs that she was headed down a different path.

“First show I did in New York was ‘No, No, Nanette!’ I was in the chorus,” she said. Mention that name around Red Sox fans at your own risk: it’s the musical version of the play Harry Frazee financed with the money he got from selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1919.

On Friday evening, baseball’s greatest rivalry was scheduled to meet for the first time this season, and the Celtics and Mavericks were set to play Game 4 in Dallas. Waldman showed up for work with a dark-green sequined top under her blazer. Around her neck hung two necklaces: a Jewish star with lapis lazuli, and a small gold Celtics logo pendant, which had belonged to her grandfather.

Yes, Waldman still bleeds green.

“My dad took me to the basketball games. You knew everybody, like here, when I was a little girl, I knew everyone in the section. The same people were there all the time,” Waldman continued, gesturing towards the baseball diamond. “But in the Boston Garden, it was different. It wasn’t the same kind of fervor at the time. The place was empty, and Red would yell when he coached. And so I got to learn my basketball listening to Red Auerbach coach (Bob) Cousy, (Bill) Sharman, (Bill) Russell, (Tommy) Heinsohn, and (Frank) Ramsey.”

Auerbach was loud and fiery, and in an arena rarely even half-full during the regular season, everyone could hear him coaching his players at full volume. He wouldn’t yell at Russell or Cousy, so if he wanted to get on them about something, he’d shout at players in their vicinity, like Heinsohn.

“I remember him (talking) about the corner: ‘You’re guarded by three, not one, get out of that corner!’” Waldman chuckled. “Red used to say, ‘There’s eight plays, there’s 48 variations on the eight plays.’”

“You’d also notice things like, when Red thought the game was over, when he’d light his cigar, because he thought it was over. I loved to watch that,” she recalled.

The original Boston Garden was a place where a young Waldman felt hopeful about a future that was more diverse and accepting than the present. The world could be a better place, if only it was more like the Celtics, who were breaking down racial barriers.

“You always thought back then, that if the world were the Boston Celtics, with the first Black coach and all-Black starting five, that this is what we thought things could be like,” she said of the historic 1964 squad. “A lot of us who went to those games actually, that’s what we thought. How things could be, it could all be like the Celtics.”

Boston’s basketball team would shape Waldman’s life in a plethora of ways. Legendary Celtics radio man Johnny Most was her idol.

“There’s a lot of Johnny Most in me, because it’s emotion, and it’s radio, and it’s how people felt,” she said. “Red told Johnny, ‘I want you to teach the city of Boston basketball,’ and when you grow up listening to Johnny Most, there’s something that gets inside of you.”

When Waldman was preparing to embark upon her own sportscasting career, she called in a favor.

“The first interview I ever did when I was trying to get ready to do this, Ken Coleman was one of my best friends, and he called up Tommy Heinsohn,” she said. “And I drove to Tommy Heinsohn’s house with a tape recorder! I was talking about when I was a little girl, and he was telling me the greatest stories.”

It’s no longer weird for Waldman to have gone from one side of the Boston-New York rivalry to the other. “It was, but it went away pretty fast, I’ve been in New York over 50 years, and Ted Williams isn’t on that team,” she said.

There is, however, one very big exception.

“The only time it gets me is when I walk back into this place. Because nothing’s changed. It’s all changed, but nothing’s changed,” Waldman said. “The same ramp that I used to walk in with my grandfather, it’s there. So here, it bothers me. Because when I come back into Fenway Park, I’m three, holding my grandfather’s hand, and that doesn’t go away.”

Nor has her affection for the Celtics.

“I keep up with them. If they’re on and I’m home, I’ll watch. I love listening to Sean (Grande),” she said. “The last round, when he was talking about how (the Celtics) play with their food, it was pure Johnny, it really was. It was so emotional, but so right-on, about this team that’s been maligned and all that. What did he say? ‘They’re going to two places where they belong: home, and to the Finals.’ He said it a lot better, but it was perfect.”

However, while parts of Boston still feel like home for Waldman, you’ll never catch her at TD Garden.

“I won’t go to the new Garden. I’ve never been, I won’t go,” she said. “Because I saw my first circus there, I saw President Kennedy speak there. The old one, it’s just, it’s too much, it’s too flooded with memories.

“I’m not great at ‘Bests,” she said. “If someone asks me, what’s the greatest Yankee thing I saw, out of my mouth will be, ‘The look on Derek Jeter’s face when he looked at his mother when he had his 3,000th hit.’ But I can’t remember a great play here and there, because that’s not what gets me. I know it’s part of sports, but that’s not what I remember. You remember the feelings. You remember the feeling of sitting with your father.”

Especially at Fenway.

“I always say everything I’ve ever done in sports is because I grew up in this town and went to Fenway.”

Yet, just because the Celtics are at home does not automatically equate playing better or the Mavericks succumbing to make this a neat and convenient story line. Boston will have to earn this win with perhaps its best performance of the season.

The Mavericks have little to lose because they are expected to lose.

No prognosticator picked Dallas to win the championship when the season began. The Mavericks are the underdogs. They are loose, knowing every victory they steal puts more pressure on the favored Celtics. This indeed has turned into a mind game.

Boston wants a title, it needs a title. The city can taste it.

“I don’t look at it as pressure,” Tatum said Sunday before practice. “I do notice, especially this time of the season, playoff time and obviously being in the Finals for the second time, when you drive around and go to the gas station, or I wanted to go get some ice cream yesterday, it’s Celtics gear everywhere and everybody is super excited about this team and what we have accomplished and what we have the chance to accomplish. You really just feel the love and support from everybody in the city of Boston, and how bad they want us to win, how much they have been cheering for us.

“So I don’t look at it as pressure. Just unconditional support, and that we have an amazing fan base here.”

The hunger is there, the players say, although it didn’t appear that way Friday. After saying they had to play like the more desperate team in Game 4 even though they weren’t, the Celtics played about six good minutes before they relented to the team that was really desperate.

There’s something to playing with zero expectations and the Mavericks have embraced that role. They are highly unlikely to come back from a 3-0 deficit. No team has done that in 156 tries, but that doesn’t mean they can’t cause angst and discomfort for their opponent in the process.

“Sometimes when you do play an opponent over and over, you get used to the tendencies and you start to capitalize on that on both ends, defensively and offensively,” Dallas coach Jason Kidd said. “Hopefully our group has seen enough of Boston to understand what they are good at, and hopefully we can take that away (Monday) night.”

Monday will be the most difficult game of the Celtics’ careers because it’s the most significant. But it’s also important to remember they still hold the advantage. A team that hasn’t lost more than two games in a row all season would have to lose four consecutive games to lose this series. But there has to be a better sense of urgency than in Game 4. The Celtics have to feed into the crowd’s enthusiasm, play a more disciplined and passionate game, and let their talents and coaching take over.

“We have a great group, resilient group, and we don’t like to lose,” Brown said. “We do our best to prepare each and every night, each and every game, and we look forward to the next game on the schedule. I think we are ready for Game 5. I think that’s the best answer that I got. I think that we’re ready. We’re at home, and we’re looking forward to it.

“This is what we all work for. We are at the precipice of completing what we set out to do at the beginning of the season. So I think it’s not difficult to get everybody in that locker room on the same page right now. It just needs to remind everybody that it’s just one possession at a time. We do it together and we fight like our lives depends on it, and I think we’ll be all right.”

The Celtics lacked that fight in Game 4 and they can no longer take these games for granted. These chances to clinch are rare and they have to play their hardest, if not their best. That’s all this fan base can request. The Celtics owe their fans their best effort and an increased sense of urgency because they have a chance to achieve a career-defining accomplishment.

“[Coach] Joe [Mazzulla] did a great job today of reminding us that it’s okay to smile during wars,” Tatum said. “It’s OK to have fun during high-pressure moments. That’s what makes our team unique and special. We would love to win (Monday), more than anything. But if it doesn’t happen, it’s not the end of the world. We have more opportunities. So just setting that table of don’t surrender to that idea that we have to win tomorrow. We would love to, absolutely. But Game 5 is the biggest game of the season because it’s the next game on the schedule.

“So going with that mind-set, and just have fun. That’s really what we talked about today. Get back to having fun and being a team and how special we are and the team that got us here.”

Gary Washburn is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at gary.washburn@globe.com. Follow him @GwashburnGlobe.

The Boston Celtics face the Dallas Mavericks in Game 5 of the NBA Finals on Sunday, June 16, 2024, at TD Garden in Boston, Massachusetts.

Fans who want to purchase tickets to the games can do so via secondary ticket markets like StubHub, Vivid Seats, Ticketmaster and TicketSmarter.

Here’s a recent NBA story from the AP:

DALLAS (AP) — Kyrie Irving’s personal 13-game losing streak against the Celtics is over.

Now it’s back to the parquet floor in Boston to face his former team again, the Dallas Mavericks still alive in the NBA Finals after avoiding a sweep with a 122-84 blowout in Game 4 on Friday night.

The first two road games in this series weren’t Irving’s best, the two in Dallas quite a bit better despite a Game 3 loss that left the Mavs with a deficit no NBA team has overcome to win a playoff series.

Combine that with much more of an impact from the role players around Irving and co-star Luka Doncic, and maybe the constant booing of Irving from the jilted fans in Boston won’t ring quite as loudly in Game 5 on Monday night.

Plenty of green-clad Celtics fans were planning a celebration in Texas, but the loud cheers early when the game was close didn’t last long.

“You saw all those Celtics fans in there tonight. They travel in packs,” said Irving, who spent two seasons in Boston. “When we go to Boston, there’s going to be a bunch of them yelling a whole bunch of crazy stuff still, but I think we’ve been able to grow and face kind of this adversity head on.

“We’re figuring out each other in a crazy way during the highest stage of basketball,” Irving said. “So it’s a beautiful thing, but it also can be chaotic if you don’t know how to stay poised through it.”

If the Mavericks are to become just the 12th of 157 teams to force a Game 6 after falling behind 3-0 — and get the title series back to Dallas — the supporting cast for Irving and Doncic will have to keep it up.

Dereck Lively II connected on a 3-pointer for the first time in his career — exactly seven months after the the second of the two regular-season attempts from beyond the arc by the 7-foot-1 rookie center.

At one point in the second half, Lively had 12 rebounds, his final total, to 16 for Boston. No wonder Dallas outscored the Celtics 60-26 in the paint, where Lively scored the other eight of his 11 points.

Dante Exum hit two 3s and had another taken away when replay revealed he had stepped out of bounds. The buckets from deep were coming from so many Dallas players — 14 of 23, although those numbers were skewed a bit by the blowout — it didn’t matter that Doncic and Irving combined to go 1 of 14.

“It’s five people on the floor,” Doncic said. “So that’s huge for us. Everybody played with a lot of energy. That’s how we got to do it. We got to think the same way in Game 5 in Boston.”

Doncic scored 25 of his 29 points in the first half, while Irving had 10 of his 21 in the third quarter to help push a 26-point halftime lead to 38 before all starters were out of the game for good late in the third.

Lively’s games in the finals have somewhat mirrored those of Irving, his fellow Duke alum. The 20-year-old was mostly quiet in Boston. The two games in Dallas put him in the company of Magic Johnson as the only rookies with consecutive double-doubles in the NBA Finals.

He replaced starter Daniel Gafford earlier than in any of the previous finals games, and coach Jason Kidd said Lively just happened to be in the right spot — the right corner — when he hit the 3 to put Dallas ahead for good about three minutes later.

It’s unlikely Lively will start at this point — something he did early in his rookie season — but the crowd probably will notice when he heads to the scorer’s table for the first time back in Boston.

“If they leave me open in the corner, I’m going to get them up, for sure,” Lively said. “It’s just having that trust. Luka is going to give me the ball. As soon as I shot it, he kind of jumped for joy when it went in.”

Irving is still trying to find some joy in Boston, and he gets another chance this season.

Thank you for relying on us to provide the journalism you can trust. Please consider supporting us with a subscription.