This morning’s newspaper carried a front-page story about itself: The incredible shrinking daily will soon shed another 25 percent of its pages, causing me to think about what I’ll miss most when it inevitably disappears altogether.

To be sure, I’ll miss racing my daughter down the driveway to retrieve the paper – or more often, racing her to the shrubs near the driveway and picking the paper off a bush as if it were some exotic, low-hanging fruit.

I’ll miss the delivery person, who shoots a left-handed hook shot over her car roof to get the paper vaguely near the driveway. I know the feeling. Whoever said “Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades” never had a paper route.

I’ll miss the plastic hang bag that my newspaper arrives in. My father-in-law uses the bags for disposing of coffee grounds, but I prefer to load them with rolled diapers, like sausages into a casing.

I’ll miss reading the newspaper, starting with Sports and moving to Arts and eventually to the front section, devouring the paper from the inside out like a termite or tapeworm. Business, Food, Style and the like will be set aside for the kids as a finger painting dropcloth.

The daily newspaper remains one of the best weapons we have against ignorance. But it is also the single finest non-lethal weapon we have against houseflies, stunning them without staining the wallpaper. And I’ll miss that when it’s gone.

Mostly, though, I’ll miss spreading the Sports section to its fullest dimensions on the kitchen table, like Patton with a map of North Africa, and then putting my cereal bowl in the center of it to anchor everything down. I’ll miss spilling soggy Cheerios on its inside pages until Big Papi’s face turns translucent with Skim milk.

Forget “All The News That’s Fit to Print.” The slogan I’d like to see on a paper is “The Placemat You Can Read.”

The NBA would like its Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy to join the first rank of international trophies, alongside the Stanley Cup, the Oscar, and the woman who married Larry King.

And so the Larry – the Obie? – was emblazoned across 50 feet of parquet floor last night, and a giant 3-D replica graced the court during introductions (like one of those tethered inflatable dragons that lend a certain jauntiness to used-car lots) and the players wore trophy patches on their jerseys, and the Garden’s exterior was fitted with an enormous Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy hood ornament, and Kobe Bryant was forced – during a promotional spot – to make out with the trophy, giving pause to Jeff Van Gundy and new resonance to the phrase “trophy wife.”

The Obie — the Larry? — is sterling silver with an overlay of vermeil. Vermeil is an alloy of sterling silver, gold and other precious metals. (Dick Vermeil was something knights wore under their chainmail for protection, the original Under Armour.)

As for what to call it: Let’s go with the Larry. The Obie, alas, already exists. It’s awarded annually to Off-Broadway performers.

If it’s true that nostalgia is a warm bath, I am wrinkled like a prune after 16 consecutive screenings of this highlight reel: Larry Bird buzzer-beaters.

It is testament to Bird’s brilliance that a video of his game-winning shots is five minutes long. What’s more remarkable is that it’s only a sampling of Larry’s game-winners.

We see, for instance, the last-second shot Larry hit to send a 1987 game against the Bullets into overtime. But we don’t see the last-second shot he hit a moment earlier, the one that didn’t count because K.C. Jones had already called time out. Nor do we see the one he hit later, to win the game in double OT. In short, Larry has a highlight reel that requires its own highlight reel, something worth remembering as the Celts and Lakers tip off tonight.

And so I thought I’d follow up my previous Celtics posting — “Where Are They Now” — with another one, called “Where Was I Then?”

When Magic hit his “junior, junior, junior sky hook” to beat the Celtics in Game 4 of the ‘87 Finals, I threw the nearest thing to my grasp — a Mennen Speed Stick — against the wall of my apartment at 519 North 20th Street in Milwaukee. The deodorant and its casing shattered, leaving the room silent (and Ocean Surf-scented).

When Larry stole Isiah’s inbound pass two weeks earlier, I was on the unfinished side of my family’s basement in Bloomington, Minn., my head buried on the ping-pong table because I didn’t want to see the Pistons celebrate. That’s when my 14-year-old brother came running in from the finished side of the basement, the side with the TV, screaming, “Oh my God Bird stole the ball the Celtics won I can’t believe it!” To this day, it outranks those of Al Michaels, Russ Hodges and Vin Scully as my favorite sports call of all time.

When Larry needed the final shot to win the 3-point shootout on NBA All-Star weekend of 1988, I was crashing at my oldest brother’s swinging ’80s bachelor pad on State Street in Chicago. For two years my brother had been telling me Jordan was the better player, an argument I refused to entertain, even into the mid-’90s. So when Bird — a couple miles away at Chicago Stadium — shot the last ball on the rack, kept his crooked index finger in the air and turned his back before that moneyball splashed in, I jumped up and down hysterically on my brother’s white couch — think Tom Cruise on “Oprah” — before dissolving in a puddle of admiration, tears and urine.

When Larry won a meaningless game against the Bucks during the 1984-85 season, I was a freshman at Marquette with a Jamaican floor mate who liked to wind me up by knocking Larry. So when Larry threw up some rainbow bullshit that went in over Paul Mokeski, that floor mate — I remember his name: Marc Gayle — ran into my room in McCormick Hall and said, “Bird is the most incredible player I’ve ever seen.” I turned on the tape recorder I kept for taping lectures and asked him to repeat it. He did. And for the rest of the year I played that tape over and over on a loop.

To this day, when I think of Larry — and I’ve done so often this week — I hear that phrase in my head, in a heavily accented Jamaican dialect: “Bird is the most incredible player I’ve ever seen.”