Ray Allen, Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce have played a combined 35 years in the NBA, and each had never won more than two rounds of playoff basketball before they joined forces last summer in Boston. Meanwhile, countless players with far inferior resumes have NBA championship rings on their fingers.

To say that these guys are hungry for a title would be an understatement.

"Starving," Sam Cassell said today.

Now, they're one win away. A championship has been their goal for so long and it's now within reach. There's just 48 minutes of basketball separating them from their basketball dreams.

"You wait your whole life for a moment like this," Eddie House, an eight-year ringless vet, acknowledged today. "We're very close. It's in our grasp. We just have to go and get it. It's up to us, collectively, from top to bottom, to go out and do everything we can to get it."

The excitement of how close they are probably reached a peak in the moments after Game 4's historic comeback. After Pierce finished his on-court interview with ABC's Michelle Tafoya, the cameras followed him down the hall and he could be seen screaming as he made his way toward the Celtics' locker room. After what his team had just accomplished, who could blame him?

"Paul is fired up," Scot Pollard, 10 years in the league without a ring, said today. "I think all year, Paul's been fired up to be on a team that he knows actually has a chance. Most of his career in Boston, he hasn't been on really good teams. So, he's been fired up all year and been a great leader for us."

It's not like Pierce hasn't wanted a title in previous years. It's just that, other than in 2002, when the Celtics lost in the Eastern Conference Finals in six games to the Nets, he hasn't been close.

"When you know you have a chance, you get hungry," Pollard said.

P.J. Brown, who has admitted that he probably wouldn't be Celtic if he didn't run across Allen and Pierce by chance at All-Star Weekend in New Orleans, got a little emotional today when asked about the possibility of winning a championship after 15 seasons of falling short.

"It means a lot," Brown said. "I'm so close. I've had a lot of disappointments throughout these last 14, 15 years, and to be right here at the doorstep, it's like a dream come true."

And you can imagine what Kevin Garnett is going through. The guy is as intense a competitor as there is in this league. He won't let anything disrupt his focus on game day. And now, after 13 long seasons, he can taste the thing that fuels that intensity.

"I am not a player who does well when I come out and I'm not centered," said of his need to control his emotions on Sunday. "But tomorrow is what it is, you know. If we're fortunate to get a win out of it, I'll probably emotionally be drained, but I'll probably at the same time enjoy it, so that's what it is."

When it comes to tempering emotions, Garnett and company have help. That's where Sam Cassell and James Posey, the only two Celtics with rings, come in. They were there in the locker room Thursday night to tell the rest of the Celtics that the series wasn't over and that there was still work to be done.

"Guys like Posey and Cassell help," Pollard said. "They've been there. They've won it."

But Posey and Cassell have just three rings between them. The collection of Allen, Brown, Garnett, House, Pierce and Pollard has 69 seasons under their belt without tasting Finals champagne. And it isn't hard to tell that their collective hunger far outweighs the calm of Posey and Cassell.

"We're starving," House concludes. "We just gotta go get it."