Even the Hollywood celebrities stayed right until the death. The limos were waiting in line outside but this was a sporting car crash that had everyone rooted to their seat.

Wincing at courtside was David Beckham, who might be new to basketball but recognises a horror show when he sees one. If he wanted to put this night into more familiar context, he need only have thought of the famous Champions League final in Istanbul in 2005.

For AC Milan and a 3-0 lead turned to dust, read the Los Angeles Lakers, who managed to break records for surrendering a 24-point advantage in front of their own stunned fans on Thursday evening: a collapse all the more remarkable as it pretty much handed the NBA championship to the Boston Celtics.

With a 3-1 lead, Boston need to win only one more game and they have a momentum that could sweep them to glory here tomorrow night. “We just wet the bed,” Kobe Bryant said of the Lakers’ disintegration. “A nice big one, too. One of the ones you can’t put a towel over. It was terrible.”

“This is what an NBA Finals masterpiece looks like,” the man from USA Today wrote in praise of the victorious, rallying Celtics, who stand one win away from their first championship for 22 years.

It was a game that brought exploding to life a series that had not quite lived up to expectations. The Celtics-Lakers rivalry is drenched in nostalgia because of the mighty clashes of the 1980s between Larry Bird’s Celtics and Magic Johnson’s Lakers: East against West, the flair of California against the unceasing toil of Massachusetts.

This was a series that was meant to drown out the allegations tumbling from the mouth of Tim Donaghy, a disgraced former referee, who has accused David Stern, the NBA commissioner, of ordering officials to influence games in favour of the most popular teams.

The only charges that have stuck are those against Donaghy, who is awaiting sentencing, having admitted betting on games in which he officiated and passing inside information to gamblers. But Stern still had to go in front of the media before Thursday’s game to try to reassure the public that Donaghy is a single rotten apple rather than part of a grand conspiracy. To Stern’s relief, all anyone was talking about by the end of the evening was a game at the Staples Centre that swung too outrageously to have been fixed by anyone.

For most of the night, Tinseltown was ready to party. The giant screen flashed up pictures of Justin Timberlake, Will Smith, Floyd Mayweather Jr and Jack Nicholson, that Lakers diehard, to name only a few of the A-listers. To Beckham’s relief, the cheer for him was as loud as anybody’s.

The England international has become quite a regular on the side-lines at the Lakers, for whom Bryant is the iconic leader and the real face of LA sport. Yet such was the home team’s early dominance that Bryant was not required to shoot a single field goal in a first half in which the Lakers sprinted 35-14 ahead. At half-time they had a 17-point lead. Yet it all started to fall apart for a tired team in the third period when a 21-3 run by Boston brought them back to 73-71. With four minutes to go, the Celtics went ahead for the first time.

The Lakers had no game plan other than to give the ball to Bryant and hope for salvation, but the league’s Most Valuable Player missed 13 out of 19 shots from the field. Paul Pierce had blocked him out of the game and Ray Allen’s composed drive to the hoop gave Boston their stunning 97-91 win – and the biggest Finals fightback since records began nearly 30 years ago. “Some turnaround in that ball game,” Phil Jackson, the Lakers coach, said. “The air went out of that building.”

“A lot of wine, a lot of beer, a lot of shots – about 20, probably,” Bryant replied, when asked how he would get over the disappointment. But with the Lakers failing to hold on to a huge lead in a must-win game in an arena where they had a 9-0 record in these play-offs, even a newcomer such as Beckham knows which way the odds are tilted.