For diehard New England sports fans, Sunday night's Patriots' win was revenge for 1986. Or maybe it was revenge for everything that has happened since.
When the ball slipped through Bill Buckner's legs that October, it was not just the epitome of the years of pain the Red Sox have suffered under the Curse of the Bambino. It was the beginning of a new curse - call it the Curse of the Charles River. Since then, every New England sports team has been plagued. The Celtics haven't won a championship since the spring before Buckner, and the Bruins have had their hearts broken in the Stanley Cup finals twice. The Patriots have never been an NFL powerhouse, and they got creamed in a Super Bowl bid five years ago.
And don't get me started on the Red Sox. I might start to cry.
On Sunday night, Adam Vinatieri came through where Buckner failed, and his field goal with no time left on the clock brought Boston its first professional sports championship in 16 years. A whole generation of children has grown up in this area and reached puberty without ever seeing one of their favorite teams achieve the ultimate dream. The Patriots brought them what they have been waiting for all their lives.
But the Patriots didn't just win games this year, they won them in style - New England sports style.
New Englanders have a flair for the dramatic, and we love to overreact. When more than two inches of snow is forecast, we run to the hardware stores and supermarkets and stock up on shovels and canned yams because we fear being shut in our houses for days (never mind that we have six cans of yams sitting in the back of the cupboard from last year's blizzard that didn't cause us to be shut in our houses). We also don't like to be comfortable. We build elaborate road systems that include things called rotaries and a lot of one-way streets to frustrate ourselves. We purposely chose to live in an area where the weather is bad so that we can complain about it all the time.
So we also don't like our sports victories to be comfortable, predictable ones where our team takes the lead at the beginning and holds it all the way through. The New England style is to come from behind. We love underdogs because, in the real world, we are the little guys. We don't have the class of New Yorkers or the nice tans of Californians. The only thing that distinguishes us is that we say "wicked" all the time and we can't pronounce our Rs. We were once hardy Puritans, and the hardy Puritans made it through hard work and faith - so we look for those values in our sports teams.
And come from behind the Patriots did, all the way from the beginning of the season when no one, not even Tom Brady's mother, thought they could ever win the championship. When the season started, the odds that the Pats would win the Super Bowl were 75-to-1. In short, they didn't have a snowball's chance in hell.
Yet in the snow two weeks ago, it was the Oakland Raiders who melted. Then last week it was the Steelers who had been heavily favored to win. Suddenly, the door to the championship had been pushed open.
A true New England fan might never admit this in public, but we were all skeptical that the Pats could win the Super Bowl. The Rams were statistically superior, and they were favored to triumph by 14 points. But then something happened that hasn't happened to a New England sports team in over 16 years: the Pats didn't choke. You can call it good luck or you can call it good strategy, but whatever it was, it led the Pats to win and led New England to rejoice.
Watching a Boston sports team win a championship is something I have waited for all my life. I am too young to have been scarred by Buckner, but I've had the Sox break my heart three times in the 1990s. I cried when Mo Vaughn signed as a free agent with Anaheim, cursed at the television screen when I saw Roger Clemens get his World Series ring with the Yankees, and bawled in 1999 when the Sox had the stuff to win the championship and choked in the ALCS.
I never got into the Celtics or the Bruins because by the time I was old enough to follow Boston sports, they were on the decline. But when the Pats started winning this year, I started to pay attention, and it brought me the joy I have been seeking for the 12 years that I have been passionate about a certain other Boston team.
The optimist in me would like to hope that this is the beginning of a new era for Boston sports. The Bruins are leading their division; the Celtics are in second place in theirs. The Sox acquired Johnny Damon over the off-season, and Nomar and Pedro say they'll be healthy this season. Without the Boston sports curse hanging over their heads, these teams won't choke, and they'll bring more joy to Beantown this year.
But something tells me not to break out all the champagne just yet. The Sox's sale is muddier than the Charles River, and one would have had to spend a lot of time at the Big Dig inhaling construction fumes to think they would be favorites to win the World Series this year. And the Bruins may be riding high, but there are five other first place teams in the NHL. A win is just a win, and as great as the Pats' win was, it doesn't mean the Curse of the Bambino will now fall as well.
What it does mean, though, is that New England had a damn good football team this year. The Pats took us for a great ride, and they brought a glory to Boston that has been missing for most of my lifetime. We should forget about figuring out whether curses have been broken and enjoy this win for what's its worth. Boston was the greatest city in the country at noon yesterday when the Pats marched through City Hall Plaza in their victory parade. Let's break out the Sam Adams, warm up the clam chowder, and rejoice.
