The Celtics’ fourth-quarter deluge beat the Warriors at their own game

Sometimes it’s hard to find the right words, whether competing in the National Spelling Bee or Thursday night’s other high-profile, high-pressure contest, the first game of the NBA finals.

Al Horford kept it simple. No fancy phraseology, no straining for meaning. “My guys found me tonight and I knocked ‘em down,” Horford said on ABC after his central role in the Boston Celtics’ stunning and strange 120-108 victory over the Golden State Warriors. “A lot of fun.”

A contest that began with the Stephen Curry three-point production line working overtime ended with the much less predictable spectacle of Horford scoring from distance and inspiring his teammates to do the same as they overturned a 12-point deficit in the fourth quarter.

A 15-year NBA veteran making his first finals appearance a day before his 36th birthday, Horford top-scored for the Celtics with 26 points, including a career-high six three-pointers. In the joint-most dominant quarter in NBA finals history, the Celtics were rampant towards the end, sinking seven three-pointers in succession on the way to going nine for 12.

In total 40 three-pointers were sunk: a finals record. Curry, the greatest beyond-the-arc shooter the NBA has ever known, contributed six of them in the first quarter alone. That was a Finals record, too. And set at Chase Center in front of celebrities including the former San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds, who knows a thing or two about going long.

Curry was so good so early in this game that it did not feel indulgent to rush ahead and imagine what he might accomplish over the remainder of a series that plenty of pundits have tipped to last the full seven-game distance. It’s a curious piece of trivia that the 34-year-old has an Oscar