City of champions

As the New England Patriots make their latest victory tour, I can't help but feel incredibly blessed. In my 22 years on this planet -- every one of them spent living in Massachusetts -- I have witnessed Boston sports teams win nine titles. The Hub of the Universe has become the Hub of Sports Championships. We've won an embarrassing amount lately, and I'm almost starting to feel a little guilty at this point.

All I can say is that I am tremendously fortunate to have come of age during this unprecedented run of success. No MLB team has won more World Series this millennium than the once-cursed Red Sox. No NFL team has won more Super Bowls during the salary cap era (1994-present) than the Patriots. The Celtics are the winningest franchise in NBA history with 17 championship banners hanging from the rafters of the Boston Garden. The Bruins, with six Stanley Cup flags in the same building, are no slouches, either. The championship cup runneth over in Beantown.

It wasn't always this way. For a long time Boston was a down-on-its-luck sports town. Fans flocked to local watering holes not to celebrate the sweet taste of victory, but to drink away the bitterness of demoralizing defeat. The Patriots were generally mediocre until the Brady/Belichick era, not once winning a Super Bowl. The Celtics went 21 years between NBA Finals appearances, losing their Irish luck somewhere along the way. The Bruins went nearly four decades without winning the Stanley Cup.

And then there were the Red Sox, who are in their own category as far as sports-induced suffering is concerned. No team has ever been responsible for more heartbreak than the Sox, who famously failed to win a World Series for 86 years despite coming oh-so-close on numerous occasions. I saw this firsthand in 2003, when I went to bed in tears after Aaron Boone crushed Boston's World Series hopes along with Tim Wakefield's knuckleball.

That all changed a few months after 9/11. After decades of failure, suddenly Boston teams couldn't lose. Everything started going our way. Suddenly we were the ones getting all the breaks and mounting the improbable comebacks. Even though we never had the best players -- no Kobe, no LeBron, no A-Rod, no Manning -- we always had the best teams. We found a way to win.

It was a swift and stunning transformation. From 1987-2001, Boston teams won zero championships. From 2002-2015, they won nine. NINE. That's a lot of duck boat parades, people. Beantown's longest stretch without a championship during that time; the three years between the Celtics' 2008 title and the Bruins' 2011 triumph. Might as well have been an eternity. In that same 2002-2015 timeframe, Boston teams appeared in 13 championship games/series. That means on average, a Boston team made the finals every year. And let's not forget that 2015 is far from over, meaning it's very possible there will be another victory parade before the year is out.

This incredible stretch of good fortune has made it easy for Bostonians to forget that championships are supposed to be exceedingly rare, that generations can pass without ever seeing one. It takes a perfect storm for a city's teams to reach the top of their respective sports at the same time, and it probably won't happen again for a long, long time.

All good things must come to an end, after all. The sports gods can't shine down on Boston forever. It's been a run for the ages, and I hope it isn't over yet. But if it is, well, I'm just glad I was along for the ride.