The picnic Joshua Levin Kipnis packed in May 2023 for his third date with Arianna Marie Lacerte didn’t come in a basket, and its provisions didn’t last the duration of what turned into eight hours of nonstop conversation.
But when Ms. Lacerte folded up the blanket they shared at Hudson River Park in Manhattan that day, it was with a better understanding of why she was falling for him.
“Josh takes initiative,” she said. “It was one of the things I was attracted to.”
When a crisis knocked the Lacerte family sideways this past November, the initiative they took together found them exchanging wedding vows in a setting neither expected. But marrying anywhere other than her father’s hospital bedside had become nonnegotiable for both.
After Ms. Lacerte and Mr. Kipnis matched on Hinge in April 2023, two shared passions — sports and family — nudged them toward a first date. At the Brooklyn cocktail bar Elsa that month, each left convinced the other was better than advertised.
“It was pretty obvious we had the same values and goals,” Ms. Lacerte said. She’d been using Hinge for more than a year, but Mr. Kipnis was the first person she was in a hurry to tell her mother about. “I called her that night and said, ‘It was just so easy. Everything flowed.’”
Growing up in the Lacerte family had felt that way, too.
Ms. Lacerte, 36, is the third of Maureen Mehringer-Lacerte and Edward Lacerte’s five children. She holds a bachelor’s degree in marketing from the University of South Carolina and earned a law degree at the University of Virginia School of Law. She is the vice president for business and legal affairs at Legends Global, a sports venue management company in Manhattan.
Since she was in diapers, Boston Celtics basketball memorabilia has been featured in the décor of her childhood home, in Westford, Mass.
“I grew up around a lot of the players,” she said, because of her father’s job. Mr. Lacerte, the team’s longtime head trainer and physical therapist, befriended many. “They would all come over when we were younger. My dad still remains really close with a handful,” including Larry Bird, Kevin McHale and Paul Pierce.
Mr. Lacerte left the Celtics in 2017 after more than 30 years with the team. But his passion for basketball had by then trailed him well beyond Boston. He was the trainer for the 1992 U.S. Olympic gold-medal-winning “Dream Team,” whose players included Mr. Bird, Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson.
Before he was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of acute monocytic leukemia in November, he had traveled around the world as part of USA Basketball’s medical staff. Last summer, that role enabled him to bring the family to the Paris Olympics.
When Mr. Kipnis was getting to know Ms. Lacerte, he was less impressed by her proximity to sports stars than the loving way she talked about her parents. Among her father’s favorite sayings, she told him, was, “We can never do enough for family.”
Mr. Kipnis felt the same. “Arianna and I had this connection early on because our parents and siblings have defined so much of who we are,” he said.
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Mr. Kipnis, 34, grew up in Charlotte, N.C., with three brothers, one older and two younger; their parents are Robert and Nancy Kipnis. He earned a bachelor’s degree in sports journalism from Vanderbilt University and works as the head of marketing and communications at the venture capital firm AlleyCorp.
Before he met Ms. Lacerte, “my Jewish mother introduced me to everyone under the sun,” he said. But his dating life in New York, where he moved in 2017, amounted mostly to nonstarters. “My friends describe me as Ted Mosby from ‘How I Met Your Mother’” — idealistic and picky — “and that kind of fit me to a T.”
By the time of the May 2023 picnic date in Hudson River Park, Ms. Lacerte was making him think that aiming high romantically had been worth it. “We found that connective thread, where we were able to talk all the time about anything,” he said.
That August, they committed to exclusivity. In January 2024, Mr. Kipnis, who had been living in Manhattan’s West Village, moved into Ms. Lacerte’s Brooklyn Heights apartment. They were in an Uber headed to brunch in December 2024, when he asked the driver to pull over a block from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, a favorite walking spot. It was 11:11 a.m. when he proposed.
Both learned early on that they regularly make a wish when the clock strikes 11:11. “I knew since we started dating the only wish worth wishing for was to spend the rest of my life with her,” he said.
Before Mr. Lacerte’s diagnosis, the two were envisioning an April 2026 wedding for more than 200 at the William Aiken House, a historic venue in Charleston, S.C. That vision fractured once they found out Mr. Lacerte, whose recovery is dependent on finding a blood stem cell donor whose immune markers are a close match for his own, might not be there for it. (No one in his family was a match.)
Within 24 hours of learning about his leukemia, on Nov. 21, Ms. Lacerte took Mr. Kipnis aside on the seventh floor of the Lahey Hospital & Medical Center in Burlington, Mass.
“I said to Josh, ‘I can’t picture my wedding day without my dad, without him walking me down the aisle or a father-daughter dance,’” she said. “I couldn’t get it out of my head.”
When she asked Mr. Kipnis if he would be up for marrying her in room 7-21 West, “he immediately said yes,” she said. Mr. Lacerte was on board, too. “He had his eyes closed when we went in to tell him,” Mr. Kipnis said. “Then he shot up and opened his eyes and said, ‘That would be so wonderful.’ We both left the room sobbing.”
On Nov. 23, Ms. Lacerte and Mr. Kipnis hurried to the Burlington Mall, minutes from the hospital. Mr. Kipnis needed dress shoes and a white shirt; both needed wedding bands. Several Costco and Kay Jewelers receipts later, their wedding looks were coming together.
Instead of speed shopping for a dress, Ms. Lacerte decided to wear the white dress she had worn to her bridal shower months earlier; the dress was hurriedly retrieved from her New York apartment by her younger sister. And the couple had found a mall kiosk willing to engrave their hastily bought gold wedding bands with a familiar saying: “We can never do enough for family.”
On Nov. 24, Ms. Lacerte and Mr. Kipnis met her mother and siblings, several of their spouses and Mr. Kipnis’s parents, who booked a spur-of-the-moment flight from Charlotte Douglas International Airport to Boston, in Mr. Lacerte’s room. By the time the bride reached her father’s bedside clutching a bouquet of fake Calla Lilies and Amaranthus — real flowers are not permitted on the oncology floor — 13 people, including their officiant, the Rev. Peter Quinn, a Catholic priest, were in the room.
Mr. Lacerte, whose energy levels have fluctuated since the diagnosis, was fully alert for the ceremony. “We didn’t know how it was going to go,” Ms. Lacerte said. “But that was the best morning we had with him. I think he knew I needed him physically there.”
After Father Quinn pronounced them married, Mr. Lacerte grabbed their hands to kiss their rings. Then Mr. Kipnis and the others stepped aside to clear the floor for a father-daughter dance.
Mr. Lacerte hadn’t been out of bed for several days. But “I was able to hold my dad up,” Ms. Lacerte said, long enough for the two to cling to each other while Celine Dion’s “Because You Loved Me” played. A year earlier, Mr. Lacerte had danced to the same song with his older daughter at her wedding. Midway through the hospital dance, Ms. Lacerte pulled her younger sister, Thea, into their embrace.
“She just got engaged,” Ms. Lacerte said. “I wanted her to have a father-daughter dance, too.”
On This Day
When Nov. 24, 2025
Where Lahey Hospital and Medical Center, Burlington, Mass.
Interfaith-ful Father Quinn, Ms. Lacerte’s childhood priest, was briefly overcome with emotion during the hospital room ceremony, reaching for Mr. Lacerte’s hand while Ms. Lacerte repeated his words during the exchange of vows. To honor Mr. Kipnis’s Jewish heritage, Father Quinn included the seven blessings central to Jewish unions. Before they recessed to the hospital’s family room for takeout Shake Shack, a sentimental nod to the smashburgers they ordered on their second date, the couple stomped a glass to cheers of “Mazel Tov!”
Teamwork Since learning of Mr. Lacerte’s diagnosis, the Boston Celtics, the N.B.A., USA Basketball and the National Marrow Donor Program have worked with Ms. Lacerte to start a national campaign to register 18- to 35-year-old blood stem cell donors through a dedicated website, NMDP.org/NBA.
The initiative started Dec. 15, when the Celtics, who were playing the Detroit Pistons, honored Mr. Lacerte by wearing pregame shooting jerseys with his last name on the back and the tagline “20 seconds could save a life” on the front. It takes 20 seconds to complete the cheek swab required to register as a blood stem cell donor.
Fighting Together Celtics staff members continue to wear pins that say #Swab4Ed in honor of the team’s longest-tenured trainer. The organization has also set up on-site testing stations for fans in the TD Garden arena. “My dad is fighting like hell,” Ms. Lacerte said. “If anybody’s going to fight this and win, it’s my dad.” Mr. Lacerte is currently at Mass General Hospital, where a transplant will take place if a donor is found.
Part Two Ms. Lacerte and Mr. Kipnis will have a larger, ceremonial wedding in April at the William Aiken House. “We want to celebrate our marriage with so many more of our friends and family that we love and mean so much to us,” Mr. Kipnis said.
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