It’s not just that Celtics history cannot be told without Tommy Heinsohn, who collected eight championships as a player, two as a coach, and witnessed the rest as a broadcaster.
It’s that Celtics history — especially the last four decades — cannot be told without hearing his gravelly, boisterous voice telling it.
“Well, Mike [Gorman] put it best,” Heinsohn told me in 2016. “There’s a generation — it’s an old generation, my friend, but it’s a generation! — that remembers me best as a player. There’s a generation that remembers me best as a coach. There’s a generation that thinks of me as a broadcaster.