Brett Brown saw it like the confetti shooters, thought Sixers won Game 3

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Brett Brown thought the Sixers had won Game 3. So did the confetti cannon operators.

The Sixers trailed the Celtics by two with 1.7 seconds remaining in regulation. The prospect of falling behind Boston 0-3 in the series seemed all too real.

But there was still a couple of ticks of hope left. That would take a bit longer to extinguish.

Ben Simmons inbounded the ball.

Marco Belinelli caught it near the three-point line in front of the Sixers' bench, turned, and nailed the jumper as the buzzer sounded.

His Sixers teammates mobbed him.

Confetti cannons erupted.

Brett Brown was headed for the locker room.

It was a heck of a moment, to be sure. But the confetti was simply one of many glaring mistakes from the Sixers on the evening.

The Sixers hadn’t won the game. And they never would (see observations).

Belinelli’s jumper was a two-point basket, not a three as the confetti shooters must have believed.

As the old saying goes, you can’t put the confetti back in the cannon. It fluttered in the air for a couple of minutes, delaying the start of overtime, and forcing Wells Fargo Center employees to rush to clear the floor.

Most in the arena pretty clearly saw that it was a two-point basket. Brett Brown wasn't one of them.

“We had drawn it to be a walkoff three,” Brown said after the game. “I thought it was. I actually left the court.”

"The confetti's coming down, and I'm more thinking about how I'd wished it was a three-point shot and not about the confetti."

Joel Embiid knew right away that it was a two.

"We knew that he made a two pointer and that the game was tied. We were happy but we knew that we had a bigger goal and that was to finish in overtime," Embiid said postgame.

They didn't.

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