Jaylen Brown, Celtics look to leave last year in the past as they face Heat again

Last May, after one of the worst losses of his basketball career, Jaylen Brown sat at the podium in disappointment.

“We failed. I failed. We let the whole city down,” Brown said minutes after the Celtics fell to the Heat in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Finals.

In that season-ending loss, Brown struggled mightily, finishing the night with a career-high 8 turnovers, and shooting just 8-23 from the field.

Now, eleven months later, Brown and the Celtics get a chance at revenge. Tomorrow at 1pm, the Celtics and Heat will face off once again — their fourth postseason match-up in five years. In the 2021 bubble, the Heat emerged victorious after six games, while in 2022, the Celtics came out on top in a tight Game 7 en route to a Finals appearance.

Last spring, after Derrick White’s Game 6 buzzer-beater, it looked like the Celtics could become the first NBA team to ever come back and win a series after trailing 0-3. Then, Jayson Tatum sprained his ankle a minute into Game 7, Rob Williams battled illness, and the rest of the team couldn’t find any rhythm. The Celtics got blown out, 103-84, in front of a devastated crowd that had to watch an opposing team hoist a trophy on the TD Garden floor for the second consecutive season.

While redemption is certainly on the Celtics’ minds, both Jaylen Brown and Joe Mazzulla told reporters at practice on Saturday that they’re looking to leave last year in the past.

“You don’t forget, but you do your best to live in the moment,” Brown said. “You learn from those experiences, and you can’t bring those thoughts into it. You got a new team, you got new players — I’m a new player. So, just, you come and you stay in the moment, and you take it one day at a time.”

The Celtics and the Heat have had substantially different seasons to date. The Celtics boasted a league-best 64-18 record, while Miami was one play-in loss away from missing the postseason altogether after finishing the year 46-36. Still, Mazzulla stressed that the team’s respective records were irrelevant, as were the outcomes of previous playoff matchups.

“Right now, everyone is 0-0,” Mazzulla said. “In my mind, the seeding doesn’t matter. The regular season doesn’t matter. What matters is just how we approach [things]. It started with how we practiced this week – all we can control is the time that we have. The guys have done a great job just honing in on all the details, the execution, on both sides of the…