"I don't think you envision anything when you're 25," Bird said.

McHale swears the gray hairs in his head are breeding since he returned to coaching nearly two months ago, and Bird's facial features seemingly droop a little more before your very eyes. And yet -- with their playing legacies and financial futures long ago assured and their managerial acumen still open for lively debate -- they remain in the game on the other side of 50, because competition is in their blood and Basketball is what they've always done.

"I know Kevin worked hard as a youngster, and I had all kinds of jobs," said Bird, the Indiana Pacers' president of Basketball operations. "But when you get right down to it, this is what we know."

Ainge and McHale collaborated two summers ago on a seismic trade that completely reshaped two franchises: It brought the Celtics both Kevin Garnett and their 17th title and set the Wolves on a painful rebuilding process that inevitably sent McHale back to the sidelines.

Two days after the Celtics beat the Wolves in Boston without Garnett present, McHale will coach from one bench and Bird will watch from behind the other tonight when the Wolves and Pacers play at Conseco Fieldhouse.

On Monday, McHale for the first time was named the Western Conference Coach of the Month for January after leading the Wolves to a 10-4 record one month after they went 2-14.

It's a place McHale never thought he'd be, neither 25 years ago when all three players watched how Red Auerbach built a team nor three months ago.

"When I was really young, Bill Fitch was my coach and at that point, I was very anti-coaching," McHale said, referring to his first NBA coach. "Bill yelled at me, yelled at us all the time. I never really could see myself doing that."

After the Pacers' practice on Monday, Bird laughed at the memories.

"I never thought he'd coach because he was a pain in the butt to some of the coaches we had," Bird said. "It wasn't that he fought with him. Coach would be on him hard, and Kevin would do the opposite just to tick him off."

Bird retired in 1992 and returned home to Indiana. Five years later, he became the Pacers' head coach. Three seasons later, he quit after leading his team to two Eastern Conference finals and after being named the NBA's Coach of the Year in 1998. And three years after that, he agreed to run the team.

"I was 35 when I retired, and I wanted to get away for a while," Bird said. "I never thought about it much, and the next thing you know, I'm coaching. After that, I took some more time off and decided I was too young to be doing what I was doing, which was nothing, whatever I wanted to do.

"You have children, and they have to tell their friends their dad doesn't work. It's kind of sad, really. So I came back and I'm involved in this now."

Both McHale and Bird are back in their home states. A Minnesota hero when he retired after winning three NBA titles, McHale took over the Wolves in 1995 and oversaw both their rise and fall, a cycle that left his public-opinion rating in the state somewhere south of the president's. Bird is trying to resurrect a Pacers team that was fined $175,000 last season because of its players' bad behavior.

Both have their championship rings and have made millions of dollars, and yet they keep trying at jobs neither has mastered like they did when they played.

"Kevin's in a situation where he wants to make it right before he gets out," Bird said. "Same thing here. We're both basically going through the same thing. I just want to make it better than how I found it. That's all you can ask.

"You don't want to walk away from something when it's down. You want to walk away when it's at the top."