The Boston Globe, July 2025
Under pressure to return a championship banner to the Garden, then-Boston Celtics coach Rick Pitino spoke blunt words that became an instant classic in Boston sports history: “Larry Bird’s not walking through that door, fans,” he proclaimed during a famously testy press conference on March 1, 2000.
“Kevin McHale’s not walking through that door. And Robert Parish isn’t walking through that door.” With a nod to Pitino’s iconic reality check, Boston’s downtown workers who left with their laptops during the pandemic aren’t walking back through the doors of their office towers, either.
“It will never be 2019 again,” Michael Nichols, president of the Downtown Boston Alliance, a group backed by downtown property owners, told the editorial board. “Anyone who romanticizes getting back to that level of foot traffic and workers downtown five days a week — that’s not coming back in Boston or anywhere else. The pandemic was a reset, not a recession, not a blip. It will last a generation or more. We are trying to create a new normal.”
