On the day Rick Pitino took office three-and-a-half years ago, it occurred to me that the spectacle of his inauguration was not all that far removed from the famous christening scene in The Godfather, in which the camera kept cutting to show a dozen Corleone Family enemies being ruthlessly eliminated even as the gala festivities were taking place.

Having been handed the keys to the kingdom as president, coach, and de facto general manager of the Boston Celtics, Pitino had ensured a complete break with the past with as thorough a job of house-cleaning as the NBA had ever witnessed.

Even before he had been officially anointed, loyal secretaries who had been with the Celtics for three decades were sent packing. From the front-office assistants to the ball boys, no one was spared in the purge.

Jan Volk, the former general manager who was literally the only man in the organisation who fully understood the intricacies of the modern-day NBA salary cap, was thrown out with the bath water. Even Red Auerbach, the beloved elder statesman who had coached the team to its early successes, and had moved on to become the most successful general manager in professional sports before easing into a role as the Celtics' titular president, was forced to cede even that largely ceremonial title when Pitino wanted it for himself.

The Pitino era, which had begun with what amounted to a coronation ceremony at Boston's Fleet Center some 1,340 days earlier, came to an inglorious conclusion this past Monday, when the author of the best-selling motivational tome Success Is A Choice faxed in his resignation from a Florida golf course.

Left in the lurch were the Celtics, a once-proud organisation which in its heyday served as the worldwide flagship of the NBA.

After the Celtics lost their 11th of 14 games in Miami on Sunday, the exasperated Pitino remained in Florida and officially resigned the following day. His departure was hardly a shock to anyone paying attention. Two months earlier he had suggested he might step down as coach and collect the $27 million remaining on his 10-year contract by serving out his term as the team's president. From that moment on it was clear that all that remained to be negotiated were the terms of his severance package.

For the better part of 35 years the Celtics were as close to a dynasty as the NBA had and will ever know. From the late 1950s until the almost simultaneous retirements of Larry Bird, Kevin McHale and Robert Parrish left them in total disarray, the team won 15 world championships, and had come to regard play-off participation as a virtual birthright.

That the three superstars who had formed the core of the Celtics all more or less got old at the same time was only part of the problem. Basketball is perhaps unique among American team sports in that a successful foray in the college draft can literally turn a team around overnight. The Celtics of the late 1980s had the incredibly bad luck to have two successive Number One draft picks die on them.

One, Maryland's Len Bias, expired from a cocaine overdose the day after he became Boston's property. The other, Northeastern's Reggie Lewis, lived long enough to become the team captain in the post-Bird era, but was cut down in his prime when he was felled by a heart irregularity while playing in an off-season pick-up game in the summer of 1993.

The resultant mess was inherited by M L Carr, a trusted former Boston player. Carr coached the Celtics to a woeful 48-116 record in three seasons at the helm, during which the team never got near the play-offs, before ownership turned to Pitino, the most respected college coach of his generation.

In 1996, Pitino had coached Kentucky to the NCAA championship, and he came within an ace of back-to-back titles when his Wildcats took Arizona into overtime before falling in the 1997 championship game. A month later he signed a 10-year, $50 million contract to become the 13th coach of the Boston Celtics.

There is some irony in the identity of the one-man search committee who undertook that 1997 head-hunting expedition. Arguably the greatest player in franchise history, Larry Bird had been collecting a handsome salary as a team "consultant" until owner Paul Gaston dispatched him on the quest to find a successor to Carr.

Never once does it appear to have crossed Gaston's mind to ask whether Bird himself might have been interested in the job. Neither, admittedly, had it occurred to anyone else around the NBA that Larry Bird might be coaching timber, but he turned out to be damned good at it.

Scant weeks after Pitino signed on with the Celtics, Bird took a similar post with the Indiana Pacers. In three seasons there he reached the play-offs three times and the NBA finals once before lapsing back into retirement.

Once, after he'd been named the NBA Coach of the Year, I asked Bird if he'd ever considered taking the Boston job himself.

"Nobody ever asked me," replied the guy the Celtics sent to hire Rick Pitino.

Pitino had coached once before at the NBA level, achieving moderate success with the New York Knicks before returning to the collegiate ranks. This time he was determined to do it his way, with his own people, and in the end it all came back to haunt him.

No one could say with certainty whether Pitino constantly revised his Master Plan or whether he ever had one to begin with, but the end product is the same. Not only were results never achieved on the court - the Celtics were 102-146 on his watch - but, over a hundred personnel moves later, the team is severely hamstrung by burdensome contracts and, by most estimates, faces a future even gloomier than the one Pitino signed on to save less than four years ago.