B-ING THERE: PRICELE$$!

I had a flashback a few nights ago to a transporting moment in sports history: the night in 1988 when my beloved Boston Bruins defeated the Montreal Canadiens in a playoff series for the first time in 45 years. I was living in South Boston at the time and didn’t have cable TV, so part of my flashback involves watching the game at the L Street Tavern. That was almost a decade before that local watering hole would become a made-over tourist destination in the wake of being featured in the Matt Damon-Ben Affleck vehicle Good Will Hunting. I lived only a couple of blocks away, on East 6th Street, but I was not a regular—and everyone there knew it on the very few occasions when I stopped in for a cold Bud. The place was the antithesis (probably not a word spoken there very often!) of the legendary Cheers bar downtown, where supposedly “Everybody knows your name”: clearly, I was an outsider and was looked upon with deep suspicion. . . . Anyway, one funny memory I have of the night the Bruins finally ousted the Habs in ’88 involves the locals toasting Bruins player Billy O’Dwyer, a native son of Southie, by singing at the television screen some lines from the mid-70s anti-war pop song “Billy, Don’t be a Hero” . . .

But last night, sitting belly up to a bar was not going to satisfy my thirst for the ecstasy of victory! By my calculation, I have been a diehard Bruins fan for at least 47 years—ever since my hometown hero Forbie Kennedy suited up for the Black and Gold back in 1964. And I have despised Les Habitants (a.k.a. the Canadiens) for almost as long. I just had to be at last night’s game . . . so yesterday morning I woke up and logged on to StubHub, my ticket broker of choice, and found a nice selection of tickets at a fairly reasonable price.

My wife and I had gone to the Bs opening night back in October—a ton of fun—but the sheer spectacle of a Game 7 was almost worth the price of admission itself: the house sure was rockin’, from start to finish, and seeing was B-lieving the outfits that some of the fans were wearing—they had more than their hearts on their sleeves, and many of them ended up being featured on the Jumbotron over center ice (maybe that was the point). I’ll not bother to tell the tale of the game—it’s happy history now. But I have to admit that when it went into overtime, I could feel one of my recurring nightmares coming on: how many times have I awakened in a cold sweat from the image of the goal scored by Jean Beliveau in double overtime in April of 1969 that eliminated the Bruins from the playoffs that year? Countless. What was it worth to feel utterly purged of that image after Nathan Horton scored the winner for the Bruins in overtime last night? Pricele$$!