How embracing absurdity leads to innovation

DETROIT — Before the Celtics and Pistons opened the 2026-27 season on Tuesday, Detroit superstar Cade Cunningham walked to midcourt, grabbed a microphone, and addressed the crowd. “The NBA wanted to start the league in Detroit this season,” Cunningham said. “Let’s start it off right.”Anticipation swelled before it quickly evaporated, with the Celtics racing to a 22-point, third-quarter lead behind the scorching shooting of 36-year-old Paul George. Coach Joe Mazzulla has said several times over the past few weeks that he wanted to see how his team responded when things were not running so smoothly. Then he got his first look in real time. After the Celtics’ big lead was trimmed to 10 early in the fourth quarter, they surrendered an unfathomable 23-0 run and started the season with a 121-113 loss that will ignite early questions about this team. The Pistons’ comeback was the largest of the first day of a season since at least 1997-98. Get Court SenseKeep up with everything Celtics with news, commentary, and analysis from the Globe's all-star team. Arrives twice weekly. Enter EmailGeorge made 7 of 12 3-pointers and had 38 points, a franchise record for a debut.

BOSTON (AP) — Kyle Francis Kennedy, the granddaughter of assassinated presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy and his wife Ethel Kennedy, has died. She was 42. An advocate for education reform and disability rights, Kennedy lived most of her life in Massachusetts. She died on Sept. 21, according to the town clerk in Westwood, Massachusetts, where she lived, and an obituary published by a funeral home. A cause of death wasn’t immediately announced.

Provincial investigators have begun in-person inspections at eight private career colleges looking for potential evidence of “irregularities or fraud,” as the Ford government continues to deal with the fallout of the alleged criminal use of the student assistance program. The government said investigators “gathered information and interviewed individuals” at the unnamed career colleges and suggested it plans to widen the inspections to additional schools, and to the “sector as a whole.”In early October, the province said students all 242 private career colleges in the province would be barred from accessing the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP) as the province investigated “serious concerns” raised by the federal government, advocacy groups and internal audits and inspections. The government alleged that some private career colleges were co-owned by immigration services and recruitment firms, could not validate students or provide verification that they were enrolled in courses and that there was a “high concentration of OSAP applications” from the same geographic locations. Story continues below advertisement