The Celtics lost that game, and the outcome was never in doubt.
With a classic display of bulldozing, nineties-style half-court basketball, Stockton and Malone firmly shoved these youngsters, who had just whipped up a youthful storm in the Eastern Conference, back into the cold mire of reality.
Garnett's stat line that night was as bare as a blank sheet of paper.
Against Karl Malone's terrifying low-post dominance, which left no opening anywhere, his otherworldly athletic gifts could not find a single foothold to work from for the full forty-eight minutes.
But unusually, once they returned to the locker room, away from the noise, Garnett-who normally threw towels and kicked chairs after a loss-neither blew up nor complained.
The nineteen-year-old simply slumped in front of his locker, letting ice packs sit strapped to his knees and shoulders, his eyes fixed blankly on the floor.
In his mind, like a slideshow, the scene from that third-quarter timeout played over and over... that man who stood ramrod straight amid the screams of the entire arena, not even drinking any water.
A long while passed.
Garnett finally raised his head slowly and looked at Sam Mitchell, who was massaging his aging lower back. His voice was hoarse. "Sam."
"How... how did he build a body like that?"
"How can anyone just never get tired like that?"
Hearing the proud rookie finally ask that question, the veteran Mitchell smiled with a little satisfaction.
He leaned heavily against the metal lockers.
"Freaks like Malone only come along a handful of times in decades. What do you think got him onto the All-NBA First Team year after year, beating every forward in the league until they cried for their mothers? That thing Lin Qi's always talking about... physical tools?"
"He did it by going back alone to his home in rural Louisiana every offseason, while everyone else was gambling big in Las Vegas or chasing women on Miami's beaches, and working himself to death like a farmer."
"While other guys were drinking champagne on the beach, he was out under the blazing sun flipping truck tires weighing hundreds of pounds, cutting down trees, splitting firewood, driving tractors, treating farmwork as basic training."
Mitchell stood up and slapped a hand heavily onto Garnett's still somewhat slender shoulder.
"Kid, when it comes to physical tools and movement speed, you really do have gifts he could only envy his whole life."
"But if you don't have that ruthlessness of his, swallowing every bit of suffering and blood and pushing forward, possession after possession..."
"If you don't work hard, those gifts of yours will all go to the dogs in Boston's nightclubs and under the spotlights before five years are up."
Garnett kept his head lowered, letting the icy water run down his knees, and did not argue a single word.
An hour after the final buzzer, in the empty visiting players' tunnel.
Wrapped in a thick, long down coat, Garnett limped toward the exit.
The tunnel was cold. Without the shouts of tens of thousands of fans, it was so quiet that only the hum of the overhead ventilation ducts could be heard.
Just as he rounded a corner, almost at the underground parking garage, Garnett abruptly stopped.
At the end of the tunnel, beneath a dim yellow wall lamp, Malone stood alone.
He had already changed into neat, dark casual clothes. There were no reporters or bodyguards around him.
The thirty-two-year-old superstar, one of the league's best, was facing the wall, going through his postgame leg stretches with methodical, almost exacting precision.
His movements were extremely slow. Stretch, hold, breathe. Every stretch of his muscles was executed with perfect form, identical even to his pregame warm-ups.
Even at this weary late hour, when everyone was rushing to shower and board the bus to leave, after nearly forty minutes of furious physical combat with a bunch of youngsters on the court, this man still carried out one iron rule of his career like a wound-up precision clock: coldly, steadily, without cutting a single corner.
In the brutally physical nineties, most Black players were accustomed to taking a quick, careless shower after games before plunging into a big city's nightclubs or falling straight into bed.
But within Salt Lake City's obsessive system, those two Utah freaks, Malone and Stockton, were among the first in the entire league to fully treat themselves as precision machines, incorporating modern sports medicine and recovery management.
After every game... home or away, a resounding victory or a crushing defeat, Malone would never shower immediately, much less bother with the media reporters pursuing him at every turn.
He had his own complete, almost ascetic full-body maintenance routine.
After games, this muscular giant standing six-foot-nine invariably had to spend at least thirty to forty minutes performing extremely deep static stretches and muscle relaxation.
He even had a pathological compulsion: no matter how insistently the team bus honked outside, no matter whether every teammate had already left, he had to hold every set of movements for the full prescribed time, refusing to shave off even a second.
The reason Malone could remain almost injury-free throughout a nineteen-year career that placed an extreme premium on violent physical combat, and even record a terrifying ten full eighty-two-game regular seasons in this meat-grinder era, lay in these dull, tedious stretches.
Every exhausted late night, they efficiently drained every drop of lactic acid from his muscles and repaired the tiny muscle fibers damaged in his battles in the paint with those freakishly athletic beasts.
Garnett nudged the brim of his baseball cap and watched in a daze.
In that instant, he suddenly understood a few things. Things Sam Mitchell had not fully spelled out in the locker room.
The Malone before him had never possessed that body of steel because of some vague, elusive talent.
Tiredness? Pain?
Malone treated these physical limits, unbearable to ordinary people, as nothing more than everyday routine.
This man simply swallowed all his exhaustion and all his suffering without a word, his face expressionless.
Again, and again.
Training, games.
Rain or shine, he always delivered.
Just like the most fitting nickname the entire league had given him.
The Mailman.
For the first time, this nineteen-year-old understood that in this ruthless professional league, there really were freaks who could hone "perseverance" to an ultimate degree that almost defied human nature.