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The comeback kid
After a dismal start to the new millennium, Boston made headlines of a more celebratory kind in 2004
BY CAMILLE DODERO

A few WEEKS ago, Matt Damon went on the Late Show with David Letterman to promote his holiday movie sequel, Ocean’s Twelve. Decked out in Red Sox paraphernalia — cap, zippered jacket, coat — Boston’s original famous Damon looked more as if he were promoting his hometown than his career. ("Is there anything left in the [Red Sox] gift shop?" Letterman joked.) After presenting the gap-toothed host, who’d scorned the Sox all season long, with a Sports Illustrated World Series commemorative issue, Damon said he’d been offered VIP access to watch the Red Sox victory parade back in Boston, but had declined in favor of celebrating the once-in-a-lifetime street fête among the feral masses. "I wanted to go stand on the side of the road," said the man who brought Boston to the big screen in Good Will Hunting, stretching his arms high, "and go, ‘Aaaaah!’ "

It was a fitting cry for Boston in 2004: the sound of 600,000 perennial runners-up finally finishing first, the noise of one nation under Sox reaffirming its citizenship after decades of contemplating defection, the exhalation of 86 years’ worth of frustration. In 2004, Boston finally stepped out from the hulking shadow of New York City, stopped apologizing for itself, and stood comfortably in its own skin.

And it wasn’t just in baseball. On the national stage in 2004, Boston graduated from understudy to starring role. The New England Patriots won their second Super Bowl in three years, putting them well on their way to becoming an NFL dynasty. Massachusetts became an international cynosure as the first US state to legally marry gay couples. At the Academy Awards, lifelong New Yorker Billy Crystal sang about a murky Massachusetts waterway. The Democratic donkey-and-pony show trotted into town, towing caravans of camera crews. A Boston Brahmin ran for the highest office in the country, and came within a few million evangelicals of getting the job.

Even the city’s physique changed. The Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge finally seemed to belong in the skyline, its ethereal blue glow and cat’s-cradle cables fitting in like a missing puzzle piece. MIT erected its own Frank Gehry structure, the Stata Center, already nicknamed "Geek Palace" by Wired magazine. And the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center opened on the waterfront, looking like what would happen if an airplane hangar mated with the Queen Mary. In 2004, Boston went in for a nose job and came out with a whole new face.

But it was a different story at the start of the new millennium. On New Year’s Day 2000, Boston College lost the Insight.com Bowl 62-28. The Red Sox had just finished off a 94-68 season, losing the ALCS to — guess who?— the New York Yankees. (Months later, the New York Times was still deconstructing the eternally lopsided rivalry between Gotham and Boston, dismissing its masochistic northern neighbors for believing in a victory as elusive as Santa Claus: "Boston seems always a title away from the title, in a field of dreams that will never come true.")

In politics, Senator Ted Kennedy upheld Boston’s loser tradition by endorsing another future flop, Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore. And there was the smug desertion of former governor William F. Weld, who moved to the Upper East Side while making noises about a prospective 2006 run for New York governor, and reflecting glibly on his Massachusetts tenure like a high-school quarterback making excuses for romancing a dorky math-club member. "I was a carpetbagger in Massachusetts," Weld bragged to the Times. "I’m a native New Yorker who spends a lot of time upstate."

But Boston’s public image wouldn’t remain so inconspicuous, so innocuous, for long. A year and a half later, the city didn’t just stumble into the national spotlight, it fell flat on its face. Two of the four planes in the 9/11 attacks lifted off from Logan Airport early that morning, and as the stone-faced newscasters read the initial reports, there was a collective gasp in our city. Geography had made Boston an unwitting accessory to the crime, and we watched the aftermath sheepishly, like the shopkeeper who sold the .38-caliber to Mark David Chapman, or like the dog that barked at Son of Sam. Nobody blamed us, exactly. Or did they?

There was palpable resentment in Rudy Giuliani’s farewell speech, in which he took a random swipe at Boston for its rising murder rate. That year, of course, the NYC mayor had morphed into a superhero for his near-flawless response to the World Trade Center attacks, leading the debilitated city with a solemn mixture of strength, empathy, and vision that inspired Time magazine to choose him as its 2001 Person of the Year. So when the big man on the international campus publicly singled out Boston’s 67 percent homicide increase — compared with NYC’s 12 percent — his acerbic tone bespoke angry censure.

Around that same time, Boston was beginning to generate other negative headlines. In January 2002, newly unsealed court documents revealed that Bernard Cardinal Law had quietly reassigned Father John Geoghan to another parish, knowing full well that the priest had been accused of pedophilia. Within months, a national scandal of child sex abuse in the Catholic Church unfurled; Law resigned at the end of the year. The Boston archdiocese became, as CNN.com put it, "the dramatic epicenter of the priestly sex-abuse scandal." The Hub of the Universe was one thing; this kind of attention was something else entirely.

But in 2004, things turned around. On February 1, Patriots kicker Adam Vinatieri pounded a Super Bowl–winning field goal, helping the New England Patriots beat the Carolina Panthers 32-29. Dimple-chinned quarterback Tom Brady, who’d miraculously emerged from the fourth-string line two years earlier, was voted Super Bowl MVP for the second time. (The Patriots would go on to set an NFL record of 18 consecutive regular-season wins.) That winter day, the only thing more stunning than Brady’s arm was Janet Jackson’s naked breast.

Even in Hollywood, Boston made cameos in 2004. On television, the city was the setting for Boston Public, Crossing Jordan, and Boston Legal. The Jim Carrey flick Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind included pivotal scenes set on a depiction of the frozen Charles River. And Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River, a crime drama based on local author Dennis Lehane’s novel, garnered six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. (It would win two: Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor.) The river’s prior claim to national fame was as the watery grave of Charles Stuart, the Scott Peterson of 1989, who murdered his pregnant wife and then leapt off the Tobin Bridge — making the film’s success seem like some form of redemption.

Boston got name-checked on the music scene, too. In 2003, Frank Black admitted he’d been casually jamming with the original Pixies line-up, and mulling the idea of a possible reunion. Given both the group’s nasty death-by-fax and the animosity between Black and bassist Kim Deal, the alt-rock rendezvous seemed as implausible as Kurt Cobain’s resurrection. But two weeks into 2004, the Pixies were confirmed for California’s Coachella festival in May. The foursome traipsed the globe all year, selling out shows as the rule rather than the exception. Still, while Boston proudly claimed ownership — after all, Deal met guitarist Joey Santiago and drummer David Lovering through an ad in the Phoenix — the Pixies didn’t return the love. The band teased their city of origin for nearly a year, playing in Lowell before finally appearing at Avalon in December. It was well worth the wait.

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Issue Date: December 24 - 30, 2004
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