For one fleeting, iridescent spark of a moment, the Red Sox were back. And then they traded Rafael Devers.
That’s at least how it felt yesterday when, mere hours after sweeping the Yankees out of Fenway Park, Boston dealt its franchise cornerstone to San Francisco in a trade that sent shockwaves through the baseball universe and threatened to ruin Father’s Day for dads across New England.
Two summers ago, after the Boston Celtics lost the 2022 NBA Finals to the Golden State Warriors, I wrote about the Championship Crucible, and the often fleeting nature of title contention windows. The core question at the heart of that post was simple: Had the C’s (or at least, this iteration of them) squandered their only shot at a championship? Would they get a second chance after wilting on NBA’s biggest stage?
As it turns out, the Celtics are getting another shot at a ring after all. And make no mistake, the team is treating it that way. Jayson Tatum said as much earlier this week:
Ah yes, the first Sunday after the Super Bowl. For 23 weeks straight, we’ve punched in at the content factory like clockwork for a few hours of mindless entertainment each weekend – whether we were watching actually good sports, celebrating our Italian (American) heritage, or enjoying the free word association beat-style poetry of Tony Romo.
But today, after finishing up our trips to the farmer’s market and walking our dogs, there is a Scott Hanson shaped hole in the middle of our afternoon. At least four long hours to fill, and the knowledge that there will be many more such Sundays to slog through in the months to come. (For The Love does not acknowledge the existence of the newly formed UFL).
This weekend, the other shoe finally drops. We’ve felt it coming for some time now. The first day back to work after Christmas and New Years is a shock to the system, yes, but at least playoff football is around the corner – hell, that is right in the middle of Bowl Season if you are into that kind of thing.
Xander Bogaerts is a San Diego Padre. What a strange sentence to write. But it’s true, all 11 years and $280 million of it. The Red Sox played a dangerous game of chicken for months, and this is the end result: San Diego swooped in with a buzzer beating blockbuster in the final moments of the Winter Meetings, Bogaerts is heading west for the next decade-plus, a day with two substantial Red Sox moves (signing All-Star closer Kenley Jansen and NPB star outfielder Masataka Yoshida) ended more bitter than sweet, and Red Sox Twitter self-immolated spectacularly in a way that only Sox fans scorned can. The reasonable take? Boston could have nipped this all in the bud last winter with a competitive offer. They didn’t, and opened the door for some team–in this case an all-jacked-up-on-Mountain-Dew AJ Preller and his Padres–to throw all of the money and years at Bogaerts and take things to a point where no sane person would be willing to go. Having said that, every sane person would agree that the Red Sox are a worse team today without Xander Bogaerts, and the Padres are a better team. The Red Sox, a team already in search of an identity, just lost a franchise cornerstone and incredible leadership figure. In many ways, it’s almost impossible to assign value to that.
I have been thinking a lot about the pre-2004 Red Sox this week, as the 2022 MLB regular season (and a particularly frustrating Red Sox campaign) came to a close. I don’t think any fan, especially those older than me with an even stronger relationship to the heartbreak wrought by the Curse of the Bambino, would say that they long for those days. And yet, there was something romantic about how 86 years forged an identity for not only a baseball team, but for a fanbase, city, and region. We knew the Red Sox would probably come up short in the end, but we loved them anyway. “There’s always next year” was equal parts coping mechanism and rallying cry. Sure, things might not have worked out this time, but the Sox would be back next April, and so would we.
It’s one of the most indelible images in NBA history: Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, and James Harden standing courtside, with Sixth Man of the Year Harden’s arms draped over his two All-NBA teammates, looking on from the bench as the Heat wrapped up their gentlemen’s sweep of the Thunder in the 2012 NBA Finals. It was simultaneously a moment of acceptance and defiance—the Thunder were beaten, but seemed galvanized. After all, those three dudes would be unquestionably be back, and this was just part of the learning curve for the NBA’s next great team.
There’s a scene in The Departed where Billy Costigan (Leo DiCaprio’s character) is asked by his probation-mandated psychiatrist to describe how it feels to do what he does as an undercover cop working the Boston mob scene.
Costigan replies: “You sit there with a mass murderer. Your heart rate is jacked. And your hand? Steady. That’s one thing I figured out about myself in prison. My hand does not shake. Ever.“
There might be no better way to describe the 2021-22 Villanova Wildcats than that clip: Clear eyes, jacked hearts, steady hands. No matter how choppy the waters seem to get, these ‘Cats never get lost at sea.
Last year around this time, I wrote about Tom Brady and the internal conflict of rooting for someone who meant so much to me for two decades, even though that person no longer played for the team I care about. It was the first post in this blog’s history (a history that also includes a breakdown of Harry Potter’s Quidditch career and a dissertation of how Real Housewives of New York reflects the decline of American society for those interested), and a lot of words to basically say “I wish Tom Brady was still on the Patriots, and I wish him the best in Tampa, but I’m still like 30% salty about this whole thing”. I probably could have saved a lot of time and energy by just posting Doug and Jem’s fight from The Town and calling it a day:
Baseball, more than any other sport, is truly Shakespearean. Everything happens so gradually, so deliberately, it’s almost impossible to actually be surprised. Even the best plot twists have been foreshadowed ad nauseam, and are less twists than the culmination of an entire play’s worth of intentional choices and actions. We’re not supposed to be shocked by Hamlet’s death, nor Romeo and Juliet’s death, or the end of Richard III’s reign. We’re supposed to reflect on all of the little moments that led to that grand, tragic finale. Baseball is no different. A 162 game season, containing three-and-half-hour marathons with hundreds of pitches and no game clock, leads to end results that may not have been expected in April, but by the time October rolls around are logical conclusions deduced from dozens of key moments over the course of a long campaign.
Julian Edelman’s retirement earlier this week was far from a surprise. If anything the writing was on the wall last week, when Patriots beat writer Karen Guregian reported that Edelman was unlikely to be able to play the entirety of the upcoming 2021 season due to the “chronic” knee issues that plagued him last year. So, on Monday when news broke that the Patriots were terminating their star wideout’s contract, I didn’t bat an eye (okay fine, maybe it was a half wink situation). I knew what was coming next.
For The Love 