If you’re in journalism, you know how this works.

You’re writing, approaching deadline, almost done, even … and you realize that your emphasis, your lead, should be something that is in the body of your current text.

So you look at the clock, decide if you have time to tear up what you’re doing … and go for it.

That is what I did for the print column I wrote for The Californian. And the link to that column is here.

If I had it to do over, I’d have had the first paragraph say this, and this only:

“Welcome to the pain, Generation Next.”

And then have gone on with what I had. I guess I felt compelled to get “Lakers fans” into the lead, and decided “Generation Next” wasn’t clear. But, hey, these are writing decisions you’re making in, oh, three seconds. Because you’ve got to send 20-some inches of copy in the next 20 minutes.

The blog entry below this one was my original column, more or less. I got around to the concept of “Celtics-green nightmares” … but I didn’t do it till the seventh or eighth graf and it finally dawned on me: That’s the story here. The nightmare is the turning of the series, and I don’t have to do hammer on the sudden switch of series momentum.  It’s tacitly understood.

Anyway, a little tutorial/inside look on how these things happen. At least, how they happen for me.

The only thing worse than not settling on the correct concept right from the start … is not thinking of it at all until after you’ve filed.

That’s happened to me, too. You’re driving home (or riding the train home, these days), and you’re recapping what you wrote and thinking, “Damn, I should have gone that way.” By then, it’s too late.

That’s one reason why blogs are good. If you give yourself even five minutes to reevaluate what you’ve just seen and attempted to synthesize, a new thought or view of things may pop into your head, and it is so clearly better …

But the flip side of this is … (and everything in life has a flip side) … when you have All the Time in the World … you can overthink yourself into something silly. You also can make it too ornate. Baroque sports writing. Rococo. When it should be stripped down and something close to bare — and you’re far more likely to have that stripped-down thing when you’re in a hell of a hurry.

Anyway, the story of Game 4 is this: For half a century, whenever the Lakers played the Celtics in the Finals, something bad, something truly awful was always — always — about to happen. But nobody under the age of 30 can remember that, and even those under the age of 50 may have memories only of the 1984 Finals the Lakers should have won. And that ’84 memory is tempered by the victories over the Celtics in 1985 and 1987.

Game 4 is the nightmare that is L.A.-Boston Hoops. That’s what I wrote. I should have done it from the start, but thank goodness I thought of it soon enough.