The final seconds of the 2008 NBA Finals tick down as the Boston Celtics close in on their 17th championship. Paul Pierce skips across midcourt and falls to his knees just inside the three-point line. Kevin Garnett gathers the basketball and uses his right arm to heave it into the heavens.

There is so much happiness on the court at TD Garden it’s easy to miss a dejected Kobe Bryant walking off the sideline towards the visitor’s locker room.

With the Los Angeles Lakers in need of a victory to push the series to a seventh game, Bryant shoots an unsightly 7-for-22 from the floor. He misses six of his nine threes and turns the ball over four times.

Garnett proclaims on live television that anything is possible, but what he and the Celtics don’t realize is that they’ve made a ravenous competitor even hungrier.

The taste of defeat the Celtics served to Bryant was all he needed to propel the Lakers forward afterward.

“In the second half of my career, the most important piece is that we lost in 2008,” Kobe said on Wednesday night. “I was determined and said I have to figure out a solution and do whatever is necessary. I can’t go through this and that was a turning point.”

After playing 82 games during the season that ended with a loss in Boston, Kobe trotted onto the court for every game during the 2008-09 as well at age 30. His production remained level with his PER increasing by a few fractions of a point. The difference came when the real season began and the Larry O’Brien trophy was within sight.

The Lakers beat the Utah Jazz in five games, Houston Rockets in seven and the Denver Nuggets in six before dominating the Orlando Magic in five games to claim Kobe’s fourth title. He averaged 30.2 points, 5.5 assists and 5.3 rebounds in 23 playoff games and won the first of two consecutive Finals MVP awards.

Los Angeles won back-to-back titles in 2009 and 2010; something Bryant doesn’t think would have happened had it not been for the pain inflicted by the Big Three.

“If we won in 2008, we probably wouldn’t have made the offseason acquisitions that we did that helped us win back-to-back championships. There’s always a give-and-take,” he said. 

Bryant knew the Celtics stood in his way of a championship when they added Ray Allen and Garnett, but he couldn’t have predicted that the trio would pay dividends so quickly.

“Their roster was a mixture of young players, veteran players, nasty, tough players. At the same time, I was extremely excited because [I knew] I might have an opportunity to live out this childhood dream of the Lakers and the Celtics,” said Bryant, who added that losing the first matchup placed added pressure in 2010’s rematch.

“When you are in that situation, especially in 2010, it’s like I don’t want to be the player years from now where the Lakers lost twice against the Celtics. I don’t want to be that guy. There was a lot of pressure to not let that happen.”

The weight Bryant felt on his shoulders was palpable. He admits that he still breaks out in a cold sweat when he hears TD Garden staples like Don’t Stop Believin’, I’m Shipping Up To Boston and In The Air Tonight on the radio. What he felt after beating the Celtics in the 2010 NBA Finals was more relief than joy.

“The loss,” he said when asked which Lakers-Celtics championship series stands out more in his memory. “I say that in the most beautiful way possible. I don’t remember the loss as like a painful experience, I remember it as a beautiful moment because it helped me find the best version of myself and my teammates. I always remember the beauty of it,” he pauses to smile, “at the time maybe not so much.”

While Bryant has the luxury of looking back at those matchups fondly now, exorcising his green demons was no walk in the park. The Celtics were one win from their second title in three years after taking Game 5 in Boston. The Lakers dominated the sixth game and needed a gritty performance in the second half of the deciding game. They trailed by 13 midway through the third quarter before outscoring the Celtics 47-30 the rest of the way.

“We were just huddling together and I said, ‘I have no idea how we are going to figure this thing out, but we are going to figure this thing out.’ That’s my recollection,” Bryant said of the second half run. “We just buckled down, we trusted each other and went out and grinded it out.”

Before worrying about Game 6, or storming back in Game 7, the Lakers had to get over the sting of losing the pivotal fifth game. Having already won four championships at that point, Bryant’s morbid sense of humor helped ease his younger teammates.

“The most beautiful memory I have took place in this locker room back here,” Bryant said as he gestured over his shoulder to the visitor’s locker room in the bowels of the Garden. 

“When we went down 3-2 and we came in this locker room and we sat there and we were all just kind of like, ‘What is happening? This can’t be happening again.’ I found the humor in it and started laughing. The guys were looking at me like something was wrong. We are one game from losing and I just said ‘they kicked our butt, that’s pretty funny.’ Secondly, if we started the season and they told us that all we had to do was go home and win two games to be NBA champions would you take that deal?”

Having tasted defeat at the hands of the Celtics in 2008, Kobe Bryant will take that deal every time.