Last week, Sen. John McCain virtually clinched the Republican nomination for the presidency, and in Norfolk, Va., on Friday, he celebrated his victory by sounding like a moron.

Criticizing Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and decrying any possibility of a withdrawal date for Iraq, McCain said, “I believe that al-Qaida would trumpet to the world that they had defeated the United States of America, and I believe that therefore they would try to follow us home.”

Let’s put aside, for the moment, the disgusting moral position of being OK with fighting a war in somebody else’s home – an estimated 50,000 in 2006, according to the Los Angeles Times – and focus instead on this notion of the terrorists following us back to the US.

It certainly sounds like a scary idea – and clearly, McCain intends for you to find it scary enough to vote for him. But there are also reasons you shouldn’t be afraid and, to me, those reasons focus largely around Larry Bird.

Yes, Larry Bird – 13-year veteran of the Boston Celtics, three-time NBA champion, 12-time NBA all-star, Olympic gold medalist and a member of the NBA’s 50th Anniversary All-Time Team. The man’s done more with a basketball than most of us do with our entire lives. And, legend has it, he knew every inch of the court at The Boston Garden.

For those of you old enough to remember, The Boston Garden had an old, wonky looking, parquet-style court. It became so rickety in later years that newscasters liked to see how many quarters they could fit between individual boards.

The floor could send a basketball bouncing in wild, unpredictable directions or cause it to stop bouncing altogether. And supposedly Bird (and many of the other Celtics) knew exactly where those spots were, what the ball would do if they got there and how to steer the opposing team into these traps.

The old Garden was also loud and inhospitable to an opposing team – louder, some argue, than Chicago Stadium was, with the audience sitting closer to the action than was customary. All of this put together made an intimidating prospect for the visiting team.

Iraq is like The Boston Garden for us: The other team is far more familiar with the court than we are. The spectators are rooting for the other team. But it’s also worse than the Garden, because the other team isn’t wearing uniforms – they’re hiding in the stands, and the shot clock is broken so that we don’t know when the game will be over, if ever.

If we bring the troops home, we’ve got home-court advantage. They’d have to spend money just to get here – money they’re currently able to spend on roadside bombs. And once they got here, they’d find an unfamiliar court where we know every corner. They’d find a population united against them, and indeed, looking out for them.

It’s because of our home-court advantage, not because of the war in Iraq, that the terrorists haven’t come here in droves. In a country where our bridges collapse by themselves, a single terrorist could hypothetically do a lot of damage – but this is our stadium. The roar of the crowd is for us. And we play better here than anyone else.

According to the London Times, internal al-Qaida documents that the Army found in Iraq just this past week said the terrorists are apparently struggling to accomplish their objectives in Iraq because they’re finding it increasingly hard to blend in.

If the terrorists can’t blend in in Iraq, then they’re going to have even less success if they were come over here, where the expense and training involved make each individual fighter more costly to lose.

So you can be afraid of a lot of things, but don’t let John McCain tell you that you should be afraid of a home-court invasion.