For old-timers, who remember major league baseball before 1969 and the advent of divisional play, there was nothing quite like a pennant race. One team went to the World Series after six months of play and all the other teams went home. A tight September was one of the most dramatic and exhilarating moments in sports. All the players on the contending teams were like characters in a great novel. The truly mesmerizing pennant races only happened a few times per decade, but when they happened, like in 1967 in the American League or 1964 in the National League, they were well worth the wait.

The NBA never had anything close to that. To the contrary, from its inception, it made regular season play less decisive and opted to have an inclusive playoff system that basically includes a majority of the teams in the league. For the contending teams, the regular season becomes a glorified exhibition schedule, with all eyes on the post-season, where legends are made. The main purpose of the regular season is to secure home court advantage for a deep round in the playoffs, but this is hardly the stuff that gets the imagination flowing. Generally the best team wins in a seven-game series, regardless of who hosts the seventh game, so this only matters when two teams are very evenly matched. And one injury or slump can destroy the advantage of home-court advantage in the playoffs in an instant. Then the 82 game battle to get it goes up in smoke.

This year, for the first time in memory, the NBA has a scenario where the regular season can approach old-time baseball for significance and drama. The reason is that there are four teams ? Boston, Cleveland, Orlando, the Lakers ? that have established themselves as by far the premier teams in the league. (The next six to ten teams are not chopped liver either; they just are not in this league.) These are all 60-plus win teams, and each of them would make an NBA champion worthy of the honor.

If these four teams were allocated two to a conference, then they would be playing out the season to host the seventh game in the conference finals. Not a huge deal, because these teams are all capable of winning a seventh game on someone else?s floor. What makes this an unusual scenario is that three of these four teams are in the Eastern conference. That changes everything.

Consider the NBA standings today:

Now consider what is at stake in the Eastern Conference. The team that finishes the season first overall will only have to play one of the other two contenders, and it will have the home-court advantage. Everything else being equal, that is a very desirable place to be.

The teams that finish second and third will have a war with each other, and then the winner of that series gets to play the (probably well-rested) number one seed. The third place team, in particular, will have a much greater degree of difficulty. To get to the finals, it will have to defeat the other two contenders, and not have the home-court advantage in either series. Moreover, its first-round game against the sixth seed will likely be against a superior team to what the other two contenders face in their first round match up. So a matter of finishing ahead or behind in the East by simply one or two games can dramatically alter the odds of a team getting to the Finals.

Yes, the Finals. It has to burn the fannies of the three contenders in the East that the Lakers get a relative cakewalk in comparison. I do not wish to demean the other teams in the west, because they are of much higher quality than the Eastern Conference teams once you get past Boston, Cleveland and Orlando. But they are not the caliber of Boston, Cleveland or Orlando.

This is particularly galling to Celtics fans. Back in the 1980s, the Celtics had to run a gauntlet of the 76ers, the underappreciated Milwaukee Bucks, and, later in the decade, the Bad Boy Pistons, to make it to the Finals. By the time they got there they had battle scars to show for it. The Lakers, by comparison, never had to face teams of that caliber in their annual victory lap through the west. 1987, in particular, comes to mind. The Lakers crushed several lightweight teams that barely deserved to be in the playoffs, while the Celtics clawed difficult, tortuous, seven-game victories over excellent Milwaukee and Detroit squads. By the time Boston got to the Finals, the hobbled team looked like it needed walkers to get around the court.

Now it is true that the Lakers failed to make the NBA Finals twice in the 1980s, but those were both cases where a clearly inferior team upset a Laker team used to snoozing through the first two or three rounds of the playoffs. The Lakers today face tougher competition in the west than those 80s teams, so they cannot afford to snooze. But if they play their game, they have a ticket to the Finals. And the first four teams are so evenly matched that the Lakers desperately need to have home-court advantage in the Finals, so they are a part of the regular season madness as well.

So we have a pennant race in the NBA this year. Every game matters. Really matters. A two-game slump in February can reduce the odds of success in May and June far more than has ever been the case before. One shot going in, one foul not called, can change the outcome of a single game, and change the outcome of the race. It is that close. A lot more rides on the regular season than any time in memory, maybe in NBA history. The stage is being set for some of the best basketball ever played.