The Hawks can win this series. They really can. They'll have to take a game in Boston to do it, but at the moment, nothing seems beyond them. At the moment, they look so good you can't believe they're the Hawks.

They have the NBA's best team reeling. The Celtics, who pride themselves on their strength of will, couldn't hold a 10-point lead with 12 minutes left Monday night. It was the second time in Game 4 that Boston seemed to have stunned the Hawks —- "They hit us in the mouth," Joe Johnson said —- and somehow the callow underdogs hit back harder. How'd that happen?

"We know we can play with these guys," said Johnson, expressing a belief that absolutely no one —- not even the Hawks —- held 51 hours earlier. But two games here, two games that defied form and reason, have turned a perfunctory exercise into a pulsating entity.

"It's a series now," Al Horford said. "Before it was 2-0."

Now it's 2-2, and the Celtics find themselves where they were in the heyday of Bird and McHale, relying on their home floor when all else fails. All else has. The team that considers itself a defensive carnivore couldn't guard two Hawks when it mattered. Joe Johnson and Josh Smith scored all 32 of their team's fourth-quarter points. Who knew this much-lampooned roster was housing a latter-day Jordan and Pippen?

"It was great to watch," said Josh Childress, speaking specifically of Johnson's 20-point period. "I was just sitting there, even though I was in the game."

On the night's biggest sequence, Childress did more than sit and watch. Inside the final minute, the Hawks up three. Smith hoists a trey and, for a change, misses. And Childress seizes his ninth rebound of the night, the biggest rebound this franchise has seen in ... oh, 15 years. How'd that happen?

"I tried to track the flight of the ball," Childress said. "I gave Ray [Allen] a little nudge —- it wasn't a foul or anything —- and I went over his head."

This was the same Ray Allen, one of Boston's vaunted Three Amigos, who failed to stop or even slow Johnson in the fourth quarter. (The Celtics tried other guys, none to any effect.) The Hawks kept running an isolation, Mike Bibby screening for Johnson, and every time Johnson whirled into the lane pretty as you please.

"We could have probably gone [with a double-teamer] a little earlier," Celtics coach Doc Rivers said. "But we've been relying on one guy [to guard his man] all year."

And now it's not working. The Hawks were too good to be guarded Monday night, the same Hawks who lost 45 games and made the playoffs only because the NBA requires eight qualifiers per conference. The same Hawks who aren't the same Hawks at all but something new and shiny and brassy and sassy.

Are the Celtics starting to think they could lose this series? "I don't know if they're thinking that," Smith said, "but I think they're questioning themselves."

Everything that worked for Boston in Games 1 and 2 —- and pretty much everything did —- has ceased working. The snooty C's are the team that keeps getting rattled, from Paul Pierce's "menacing gesture" (for which the NBA fined him $25,000) toward Horford in Game 3 to Kevin Garnett's square-off with Zaza Pachulia last night. Yes, one of the world's best players got into it with one of the worst, thereby illustrating how frazzled this No. 1 seed has become.

The Celtics were supposed to win in a breeze, and the only breeze they felt in Game 4 was the wind whipped up when Johnson flew past. "We're so young and athletic," Johnson said, "we can create a mismatch."

That's what this series was supposed to be, and what it is no longer. The Hawks can win this thing. Yes, the Hawks. Yes, really.

mbradley@ajc.com