BOSTON — This is a team that trailed the Chicago Bulls at the end of the third quarter on April 14.

It’s a significant moment in time when thinking about the Miami Heat, for on that date they were losing with exactly 12 minutes to go in their season.

They were in the Play-In finale, considered by those of us who do not wear Heat tank tops and game shorts to be a whopper of a disappointment already, considering one season prior Miami was the No. 1 seed in the East and came within a Jimmy Butler 3 at the end of Game 7 in the Eastern Conference finals from advancing to the title round.

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There they were, down by a point through three quarters against the Bulls. The winner was getting on an airplane and flying to Milwaukee, where the top-seeded Bucks would be waiting to host a first-round series on April 16.

The immediate and longer-term outlook seemed bleak for the Heat. That particular look turned out to be rather deceiving.

Fast forward one month and three days. The Bucks have already been to Cancun and back and fired their coach. The New York Knicks were summarily dismissed in six games, with the locals tearing posters of their team’s best player (Julius Randle) off the walls at Penn Station and stomping on them.

The Heat, yeah, they’re still playing, just three wins from becoming the second team in NBA history and first since 1999 to make the finals as an eighth seed.

Could they have possibly known then, down to the Bulls with a summer vacation breathing on their headbands, that all this giant slaying was in the cards?

“Damn right I did,” Butler said. “Damn right we did. And the best part about it is we still don’t care what none of y’all think, honestly speaking. We don’t care if you pick us to win. We never have. We never will.”

Butler was incredible in Game 1 of the 2023 Eastern Conference finals on Wednesday night, scoring 35 points and controlling play on both sides in the Heat’s 123-116 win over the Boston Celtics.

Some of his “us against the world” rhetoric, perhaps it sounds familiar. He and the Heat were saying similar things a year ago when they were the top team in the East and felt disrespected by NBA prognosticators, awards voters and even the TV networks that didn’t put them on national TV too much.

The different part is the inner confidence while fighting from an outwardly weaker position of being the eighth seed. It was no fluke that the Heat barely made the playoffs. Eighty-two regular-season games and two Play-In contests proved them to be a wayward shooting, oft-injured, inconsistent bunch — not the kind of team that beats No. 1 seeds and strolls into TD Garden and cuts the Celtics’ hearts right out of their chests.

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“We know the group of guys we have in this locker room,” Butler said. “We know that Coach Spo (Erik Spoelstra) puts so much confidence and belief in each and every one of us. Coach Pat (Riley) as well.

“So our circle is small, but the circle got so much love for one another,” Butler said. “We pump constant confidence into everybody. We go out there and we hoop and we play basketball the right way, knowing that we’ve always got a chance.”

This series is of course a rematch from the last Eastern finals, and there are a number of technical differences between then and now to touch on.

On Miami’s side, the Heat now run their offense primarily through center Bam Adebayo, because the franchise’s primary point guard from a year ago, Kyle Lowry, now comes off the bench. Tyler Herro’s broken right hand is still in a splint, and Victor Oladipo is gone after his torn knee ligament. Kevin Love starts where P.J. Tucker used to start — two vastly different players in terms of skill set, with perhaps the one commonality being they both fit next to Adebayo.

On the Celtics’ side, Joe Mazzulla is the coach instead of Ime Udoka, and Mazzulla has gone away from Grant Williams almost entirely. Williams barely played at the end of Boston’s second round win over the 76ers and was a DNP in Game 1 against the Heat.

We of course will see how it all plays out over the next two weeks, how Mazzulla adjusts and if the Heat’s leaner rotation will finally run out of pixie dust.

Today is about admiring the magic.

“I would say that everybody counted us out from the beginning was kind of what builds that chip (on our shoulder), but also the adversity that we’ve been through the whole season, the ups and downs, the games we should have won but didn’t win, going to the locker room and trying to figure it out, rewrite whatever we did wrong, and going through that put us in this position,” Adebayo said. “Now I feel like we are one of the best teams in the league, because adversity built this. We all looked each other in the face and said, this is the second Play-In game, this is our last run. This is it. From there, man, I just felt like everybody just bought into that will.

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“I feel like we’ve just been willing wins.”

Because of where the Heat were when the playoffs began, and what happened to Herro (their third-leading scorer), and even beyond that, Miami didn’t make any roster upgrades last offseason, the assumption was any success the team was to have in the playoffs would because of Butler.

And yes, there were those absurd moments in the first-round upset of Milwaukee (Jimmy doesn’t care what we say, well I don’t care what he says either — that was an upset) when he scored 56 points in Game 4, made that circus shot to send Game 5 into overtime and finished off the Bucks with another 42 points.

Butler naturally had another historic game against the Celtics — his second career playoff game with at least 30 points, five rebounds, five assists, and five steals — but Adebayo chipped in 20 points and literally four other players each scored 15. If we’re talking about belief and odds defying and where the inner confidence comes from, start with Butler and how his individual dominance spreads the goods to his teammates.

“You can’t quantify it,” Miami coach Erik Spoelstra said, when asked about the calming effect Butler has on the rest of the Heat when he’s playing like this. “There’s no analytic to it. Just the feeling of stability in the locker room. … There’s just a settling effect that is impossible to quantify. Like, ‘all right, we are in striking distance. Let’s just settle into our game, and Jimmy will make a bunch of plays, Bam will make a bunch of plays and everybody will be all right and everybody will just fit into their roles.’

“But that’s what the great players do.”

The Heat have used Adebayo to run their offense for much of the season, but it is glaring against the backdrop of the Celtics, who swarmed him last year in a different role with the difficult combo of Robert Williams III and Al Horford. Adebayo, brimming with confidence, said, “I’ve gotten so much better since last year, making reads, being aggressive, knowing the time to score.”

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“It’s a different me playing than it was last year,” he said.

Lowry is different from a year ago too. He was hobbled for most of the playoffs in 2022 with a bad hamstring that limited him big time against the Celtics in the conference finals. He’s healthy now, and also, he’s coming off the bench, which gives Miami at least some of the scoring potential it had when Herro was the sixth man last season. Spoelstra can utilize Lowry now in multiple lineups in a way that he couldn’t, and it has changed the dynamic on the Heat in these playoffs.

Lowry, 37, a star for much of his career, has been rejuvenated as a role player. Rather than sharing the burden with Butler to carry the Heat, and being unable to do it because of injury, Lowry is mixing with the Max Struses and Gabe Vincents and Caleb Martins and Kevin Loves of the world.

“We got two guys, our stars, that give us all the confidence that we need,” Lowry said. “I’m dead serious. Jimmy and Bam and these guys and our coaching staff, and we know the work that we put in.

“When you have guys that are so unselfish and give us the confidence to do it, we are going to do it. We don’t want to let them down.”

It’s this confidence that makes Miami so dangerous. The Heat have come a long, long way since April 14.

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(Top Photo: Nathaniel S. Butler / NBAE via Getty Images)