Pats, Sox put Boston on top of sports world

By Greg Garber

ESPN.com

Over the years, this pronounced perception has grown: New Englanders love to revel in the failure of their sports teams. In some quarters, there was a sneaking suspicion that they lived to lose.

As the Boston Bruins' flurry of the early 1970s faded and the Boston Celtics franchise slipped into the mediocrity of middle age in the 1990s, the half-filled glass seemed to become emptier. As the millennium approached, prospects seemed typically bleak. The last Bruins NHL championship came in 1972, 32 years ago. The Celtics were the NBA champs in 1986, representing an 18-year drought.

The Red Sox -- tantalizingly close in 1946, 1967, 1975 and 1986 -- could never quite close the deal in the World Series. The Patriots, who reached the Super Bowl at the end of the 1985 and 1996 seasons, followed the close-but-no-title-cigar protocol.

New England sports fans, particularly those in Boston, met their fate with the stoicism and a stiff upper lip appropriate for their Calvinist forebears. This was, they had come to believe, the way it was meant to be. read on

GO PATS!