Now the Patriots are in the Super Bowl again, a bookend to a decade for the ages, touching off waves of nostalgia and reminding of a time when duck boats carried only tourists, not champagne-drenched champions.
Winning may never get old, but it can never really be new again.
“It’s crazy to think about what Boston’s been through in the last 10 years. It’s awesome,’’ said Lane, then a Malden Catholic sophomore, now a 25-year-old accountant. “But it doesn’t feel the same, really.’’
Things were so bleak back then that just a few months earlier, 20,000 people had turned out on City Hall Plaza to see Ray Bourque hoist a Stanley Cup that belonged . . . to Colorado. And now they were bear-hugging a victory of their own, jamming Government Center, lining 10-deep along the parade route, hanging from lampposts.
They all said the same: “You’ve got to be here,’’ Lane told a reporter then. “It may happen just once.’’
“It’s very important,’’ Patricia Noviello of Raynham said then, shivering in the 20-degree chill with her four children - then 9, 7, 5, and 2 - after huddling all day on Tremont Street to watch the champions roll by. “I figure it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.’’
“When you see it, it was like yesterday,’’ recalled Noviello, now 48, “but it really wasn’t, because I look at my kids and how old they are.’’
She brought the brood back for the next five rallies but missed the Bruins fete last year, unable to get off work as a nurse. Her oldest, Meghan, drove the other three, keeping their streak alive at seven - so many rallies they can be hard to remember.
“They all just kind of get mixed together,’’ conceded Meghan, now 19 and a college freshman. “But it’s cool that we were born then. This is our era.’’
So much has changed. The Patriots are favored to win the region’s eighth title in a span of 10 years and two days. That’s right, favored - and no one needs to spit twice or cross themselves for being so brazen as to say it aloud.
