E-Mail This Article to a Friend Today’s teens are locked in the glory days BY CHRISTOPHER YOUNG

Imagine you are a 17-year-old kid who’s just gotten his driver’s license. If this youngster is a sports fan of the local teams, he got his first introduction to sports mania at around age 10, when the New England Patriots reached only their second Super Bowl in franchise history. Sure, the Pats lost Super Bowl XXXI in January of 1997 to the Packers, 34-20, but man, what a game it was, and the 14-point underdog Patriots gave the Brett Favre–led Team of Destiny du jour a real scare.

A year and a half later, this now 11-year-old sees the Red Sox clinch their first playoff berth in three years. The team loses in the divisional round to the Injuns, but Boston is right back in it a year later, and this time stuns the Tribe in five games. The Sox ultimately lose in five games to the hated Yankees in the ALCS, but it was a fun season and bodes well for the future (and irrevocably re-ignites the New York–Boston rivalry).

Then the year 2000 comes, the kid’s having fun with that newfangled Internet thing, the biggest election fiasco in the history of the world goes down, and then September 11 happens. You’re 14 and the world is a much different place, but as a New England sports fan, the fun is just beginning.

This kid doesn’t remember the Patriots’ bumbling cast of head coaches by the name of Dick MacPherson or Rod Rust, or the 1990 season when the hapless Patsies went 1-15. The names Victor Kiam and James Orthwein mean nothing, although you kind of know who that Parcells guy was, and that the New England football franchise had but three losing seasons in the 12 years since the Tuna came aboard. All you know about the Patriots is that they’ve been pretty good each year, and all of a sudden, five years after that Super Bowl loss to the Pack, the Pats are all of a sudden very good. They storm through the 2001-’02 playoffs on some kind of destiny train, and stun the heavily favored Rams to capture the organization’s first-ever title.

You’re 15, and all’s right in the world. The Patriots have a brand-new football stadium, and the Red Sox appear ready to shelve plans for their new stadium — which is without question a good thing.

But wait — it gets better. (And how.) The Pats nearly qualify for the playoffs again the next year, but just when you think the team is reverting to form (or at least the form your parents told you about), it shakes off a 2-2 start in 2003 and runs off 15 straight victories en route to win another Super Bowl crown. Meanwhile, the Red Sox fight themselves out of an 0-2 hole in the ALDS to vanquish the A’s, and then wage a cataclysmic ALCS with the Pinstripers before falling in a mind-numbing seven games. You are formally introduced to local-sports calamity at this point, but the Patriots help you forget the pain by authoring that remarkable unbeaten streak and championship run. You’ve now seen three Patriots Super Bowl appearances and three Red Sox playoff berths in the last six years (along with three Celtics and four Bruins playoffs).

It shouldn’t get any better than that, but it does: in 2004 the Red Sox claim their first title since World War I ("What the heck was World War I?" you ask). Then, when the euphoria of that miraculous accomplishment begins to fade, your New England Patriots are again in the thick of things as far as NFL supremacy goes.

The win streak that started in 2003-’04 eventually reaches 21 before crashing in the Steel City, but the Pats reach the playoffs for the third time in four years and finish a franchise-best 14-2. (You, of course, have no comprehension of the fact that the team actually missed the playoffs for seven straight years — from 1987 to 1993 — nor of the fact that the team qualified for the post-season only three times from 1960 through 1981.) The Colts come to town, and the world picks them to knock off your heroes, but you know nothing about chokes and failure in regard to the Patriots. You go only by what you have seen, so you’re not surprised to see Indy go down, 20-3.

New England goes back to Pittsburgh, and why should you believe otherwise? You’re 17 and have become accustomed to having the best team in the land. Packers and Vince Lombardi? The 49ers with Joe Montana? The Cowboys with their cast of villains? They may have been dynasties in their day and age, but right now, there is no team more admired and respected than your Patriots, and losing to anyone — much less to a rookie QB, scowlin’ Bill Cowher, and the towel-waving faithful — is not conceivable.

And so it wasn’t. You’re a high-school junior living in New England, and your Red Sox are the world champions, while your Patriots have two Super Bowls in the bank and are going back for a third (after 42 years of title droughts). Even your favorite college men’s hoops team — the BC Eagles — is undefeated and in the top 10 nationally.

These, young friend, are the good old days that you will someday look back upon fondly when you are our age, and you will discuss them in the same terms that people our age used to discuss the Celtics of the ’60s and ’80s, and the Bruins of the early ’70s. You, of course, have it much better than we ever did, and you better damn well appreciate it.

You’ll likely learn about disappointment and heartbreak at some later date — and it’ll certainly come, just wait for it — but right now, your 17-year-old sports fan’s heart is glowin’ like the metal on the edge of a knife (with all due respect to Meat Loaf). And if you can’t find your paradise by the dashboard light, then you’ll likely find it instead in the sports-lover’s heaven that exists right here, right now, in snowy New England.

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