A fired-up crowd at TD Banknorth Garden tonight should fire up Celtics’ forward Paul Pierce as he hopes to continue his stellar play in the NBA Finals and deliver Boston its first NBA title in 22 years.

MCT / Michael Goulding

It’s time to see if the home-court crutch is enough to save the Boston Celtics.

All season long, the Celtics firmly established themselves as the NBA’s premier team. A league-high 66 wins guaranteed that all of the most critical playoff games would tip off inside TD Banknorth Garden. Tonight Celtics’ fans will witness one of those games.

The Celts hold a 3-2 lead in the NBA Finals and have two shots at home of knocking out the Los Angeles Lakers and winning the franchise’s first championship in 22 years.

“Hey, we’re up one game with two games to go at home so it feels like we have the advantage in the series and I do feel like we’re the better team,” said Paul Pierce.

Of course the Celtics wished they would be partying, and not still playing, right now. The Celts first chance at sending the Lakers home went by the boards Sunday night in L.A. when the Lakers showed surprising spunk and toughness on the way to a 103-98 win. Boston played without starting center Kendrick Perkins (shoulder sprain) and Kevin Garnett struggled with foul woes. Garnett still finished with 13 points and 14 rebounds but he clearly wasn’t his dominant self, especially in the lane.

The Lakers took advantage of both Garnett and his teammates’ general lack of production inside. Pau Gasol (19 points, 13 rebounds) and Lamar Odom (20 and 11) stopped getting pushed around and helped the Lakers score 50 points in the paint and outrebound the Celtics, 40-37.

While the overall greatness of Kobe Bryant can never be underestimated in a do-or-die playoff situation, it is clear that continued physical play from Gasol and Odom is necessary for the Lakers to pull off what would be a huge upset and win two games in Boston this week.

“We tried to be physical with or without [Perkins],” said Gasol. “Obviously he’s a bigger presence than the other guys. Lamar and me, we try to do as good of a job as we can because it’s not easy. We try to protect our paint and make sure we control the boards.”

The additional inside production gave the Lakers six double-figure scorers. That’s a balance the team hasn’t played with through the series and must be curtailed.

“I’m looking at the scoring (column),” said Odom. “We’re not going to beat them if it’s not balanced. It’s going to help [Bryant] free his game up at the end of the games if it’s balanced scoring because guys tend to stick with you a little bit more when you’ve been aggressive throughout the game.”

As for the Lakers’ tall task, they say they’ll play loose. No one expects them to win but, as Bryant said, if you told him back in training camp that he’d be only two wins away from a championship in June, he’d take that challenge every time.

“We know that we’re obviously two wins away from winning a championship but we also know that without winning the first one we’re not going to get to the second one,” said Gasol. “We’ll focus tremendously hard on Game Six because it’s going to be super-hard to get that one. We definitely want to give ourselves a chance to get to Game Seven.”

The Celtics left the West Coast yesterday with a huge hangover of regret. Even without Perkins in the lineup and nothing from his replacement, Leon Powe, the Celts had their chances to steal a win and the title.

Two missed free throws by Garnett with 2:31 left in a two-point game were killers. The ultimate play came with 40 seconds left and the Celts still down by two, 97-95. Bryant reached around a driving Pierce and poked the ball free. Odom scooped it up and fired ahead to Bryant for an easy score and a 99-95 cushion.

The Celtics say they weren’t content with winning the title at home, no matter what their fans would prefer. They wanted it over Sunday, for several reasons. First, Perkins may not play tonight either and his defense and rebounding presence is clearly missed. Without him taking up 20-25 minutes, reserve center P.J. Brown is asked to handle too much of a load.

He came up short in Game Five with only three rebounds in 24 minutes. Getting Brown and Powe to hit the glass if Perkins isn’t around is vital.

“It’s not what we wanted. We wanted two more (wins),” said coach Doc Rivers. “Obviously the blanket was that we get to go home but we really believed that we could win one of these games. You know what? We had our chances in all three. We won one of them and we’ll take it but that’s obviously not what we want.”

kmcnamar@projo.com