Let’s go around the horn and see get some ballpark figures from the five local sports outfits that face off, tip off, kick off, tick off, and play on in the Sporting News’s Best Sports City.

• Bruins — I was up at training camp in Wilmington on Friday to conduct an interview with center Brian Rolston, who will be profiled in the upcoming Boston Bruins Official Yearbook, a publication produced by the Phoenix. What I took from my visit there is that this current group of Bruins is a loose, easygoing bunch of players who get along famously with each other. I have been involved in the production of the B’s yearbooks for each of the past 15 years, and I am always amazed at what a close-knit group this band of Black and Gold inevitably becomes, and what inherently good guys they all are. While I hope that Rolston does not become the third yearbook cover boy in the past four years to be an ex-Bruin by the following September (following Jason Allison ’99 and Bill Guerin ’01), it is definitely a possibility. Rolston, along with Sergei Samsonov and Joe Thornton, are free agents at the end of this upcoming campaign, and as Guerin in particular showed, even Bruin team leaders with local roots can be lured away by the attraction of a big-money contract, and each of the aforementioned free-agent-eligible skaters will be highly in demand come next summer. The Bruins brass would do well to re-sign them quickly before that kind of exodus becomes a possibility, since it seems that whenever things reach a point where a Boston Bruin plays out his contract, no extension = goodbye. Sometimes the team will stick by its guns and wait for the player to cave, as happened a few years back with Byron Dafoe and Kyle McLaren, two players who finally lost the staring contests and re-signed. However, with Guerin and Dafoe in this past season, along with Anson Carter two years ago and Allison last fall, those players were content to wait for Harry Sinden or Mike O’Connell to show them the money, and when they didn’t, each was subsequently shipped off in trade to someone willing to pay, or signed by someone else, with Dafoe (thus far unsigned by anyone) the only exception. And not only are the Bruins embarking on the 2002-’03 campaign without Guerin and Dafoe, arguably the co-MVPs of last season’s Eastern Conference number-one seed, but McLaren, the team’s oft-injured defenseman, is also unsigned, and has told the team to trade him because the "karma" in Boston is no longer there for him. The team is making no effort to re-sign the rugged blueliner, and though it will listen to any trade offers, Boston has no intention of including McLaren in the upcoming media guide or yearbook.

While the overall karma may not be all positive for this year’s squad, some great talent is still there. With Rolston and Glen Murray coming off career years, and Samsonov and Thornton leading the young bucks (should they stick around), Robbie Ftorek’s team could rebound nicely in the years to come from the loss of three of its best players. Unlike past years, where the B’s would open the campaign with a couple of home games before hitting the road while the circus was in town, this year the season is beginning a week later, so Boston will play its first six games out West, beginning on October 11 in Minneapolis. When they return on October 24 to retire Terry O’Reilly’s number 24 at the home opener, we should all have at least some indication of what stuff the Bruins are made of.

• Celtics — To nearly everyone’s surprise, the franchise was just sold last week by the Gaston family to a group of local investors for a reported $360 million, the top price ever paid for an NBA team. With this purchase, four of the five area pro franchises now have at least some semblance of provincial ownership, or at least the appearance of an ownership that is firmly based in Massachusetts and/or cares about more than just the bottom line. The Kraft family, which owns the Patriots and the soccer team Revolution, has one championship in hand and could be en route to its second in nine months with the playoff fortunes of the Revs (see below). We all know about the change in Red Sox’ ownership last winter, and John Henry et al. have not only enhanced the Fenway Park experience, they’ve also been familiar sights at numerous Sox games all season long. Only Buffalo-based Jeremy Jacobs, the Delaware North Company founder who owns the Bruins and the FleetCenter, remains on the fringe, a man who governs from afar with virtually no hands-on management skills. Unlike small children, he is heard but not seen. And the sounds that emanate from the shores of Lake Ontario are directives for Sinden and O’Connell to keep the purse strings tight, although change may be in store now that Jacobs’s son, Charles, has taken an office in the Fleet as a Bruins executive vice-president. Anyway, getting back to the Celtics, while the defending Eastern Conference runners-up are retooling after the departure of budget-cut casualties Erick Strickland and Rodney Rodgers, the team has high hopes again, and its nucleus is sound. New Jersey is the team to beat in the East, no doubt, but with Antoine Walker, Paul Pierce, and enigmatic addition Vin Baker, the Celts should win 50 for the first time since the early ’90s.

One minor distraction as the team has opened camp has been the attempted-murder trial in Boston of the alleged assailants of Pierce, who was stabbed in a local nightclub in September 2000. Two witnesses have recanted their previous versions of the events that night, and even Pierce’s memory has become somewhat foggy regarding the identities of his attackers. The prosecution has had a difficult time proving its case against the three defendants, and some local criticism has been heaped on Pierce himself, since there have been murmurings that he can’t form a picture of the assailants because he is heeding some kind of "code of silence." One wonders why he was even put on the stand to describe the attack if he couldn’t ID the perpetrators, but whether he is scared of retribution or is upholding some kind of ’hood loyalty, the fact is that this jury will have a tough time sending someone, anyone, to the big house for this crime if no one can even agree on who was there and who wasn’t.

• Patriots — They’re only as good as their last game, and heading into Sunday’s tilt in Miami, the Pats are 3-1 after struggling their last two games. A win will quiet the masses who are beginning to question Bill Belichick’s reputed genius and the team’s invincibility; a loss will feel to its fans as if it’s the team’s third straight, even though New England escaped with an overtime win in week three before its seven-point loss to the Chargers last week. Still, the parity in the league, as evidenced by Baltimore’s rout of Denver and the Chiefs’ pummeling of the Dolphins, continues to dominate, and there is no clear favorite in either conference after four weeks of play. At this rate, the last undefeated team could be gone as of Sunday night, and the Super Bowl XXXVII favorite Rams and Steelers could emerge from the weekend 0-5 and 1-3 respectively. So I advise Patriots Nation to take it easy, enjoy a team that’s still among the elite in the NFL, and not worry for real until a playoff berth is in doubt — a scenario seems difficult to imagine at this point. A loss to Miami would be disappointing, but will mean little in the grand scheme of things when it’s been proven already that anybody can beat anybody right now.

• Red Sox — Regular readers of this column have sensed my frustration with this team all summer long, but upon further review, enough’s been written about the whys and wherefores of the Sox’ demise. Lack of leadership, lack of clutch hitting, impatience at the plate, mediocre middle-relief work, and lack of finish. There you have it; enough whining about it. After all, Sox fans are not the only ones whose hopes for postseason glory were dashed; think about Mets fans (last place behind Montreal and Florida despite a $95 million payroll), Rangers fans (last, $105m), and Dodgers fans (third place, $114m). How about Mariners fans? Their team won a league-record 114 times last year and should have gone to the World Series, but finished 93-69 (like Boston) and out of the playoffs with essentially the same team. Ninety-three wins ain’t bad, but Sox fans can’t forget that their team had 40 in early June and couldn’t finish the job; that’s what hurts. You get your hopes up? You know what happens. As I always say, "Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed."

Anyway, things could have been a lot worse than having a bunch of underachievers. How would you like to be a Tigers fan right now? Royals, Devil Rays, Expos, Indians, Marlins. All boring teams with no hope all season long, and presumably little for next year, also. What should warm the cockles of any baseball fan’s heart is the success of teams like the A’s and Twins, who reached the post-season despite payrolls that ranked 27th and 28th, respectively, in the 30-team standings. Yeah, the Yanks will probably take it again, but there’s nothing wrong with hopping on the back of teams like the Angels, A’s, Twins, or Cardinals and seeing where they’ll take us in the next few weeks, perhaps penning their own Cinderella story just as our beloved football team did last winter.

• Revolution — Some joker just three weeks ago actually wrote this drivel: "And though the MLS Cup will definitely be hoisted on the Revs’ home turf next month, it unfortunately will be by somebody else, because only a flat-out miracle will bring the team to a spot in the championship game that they will host in absentia." All right, you can guess what nincompoop wrote it, but seriously, the team finished its season 12-14-2, and in first place in its division. Does that look like a first-place record to you? Nonetheless, the team went 5-0-1 in its final six games, won its quarterfinal series, and now is among the four remaining teams in the running for the MLS Cup. That, my friends, is as close to the aforementioned "flat-out miracle" as you can get. In addition, of the four potential games the Revs could play en route to the title, three will be at the Razor’s Edge (Gillette Stadium). No team is hotter right now; in the last nine games, the Revs outscored the competition 18-5. They could just win it all.

For my snide doubts and commentary, I apologize to the Revolution organization and its fans.

And who could have guessed that another worst-to-first champion could take up residence in those fancy Foxborough digs, just five months after the joint opened?

I guess when you’re in that town, you’ve gotta believe. And I do.

Sporting Eye runs Mondays and Fridays at BostonPhoenix.com. Christopher Young can be reached at cyoung[a]phx.com