Beantown Fan Attic

In the first game that year, New England lost to the Buffalo Bills, 34-0. Tom Brady was sacked a number of times and had one of his worst games ever... statistically, at least. It's hard to be on top of game when you're underneath a laughing defensive end or blitzing safety.

Fast-forward to the regular season finale; New England turns it around and dumps the Bills by an identical 34 to zip whitewash. The game wasn't as close as the score indicated, y'all will recall.

You don't how good or how bad your team is and what's needed to improve your chances until at least game six or eight.

It's too bad... an injury. No player deserves it, but football is a violent game and the mother of a lot of hard, sometimes fatal accidents.

This is going to make the road to another Superbowl muddy and slow. I figure Tom Brady is worth 10 points more per game than Matt Cassel, not to mention ball control issues and keeping the other offense off the field. If the Pats scored ten less per game last year, they would have been 10-6 instead of 16-0 in the regular season.

On the other hand, other AFC powers seem to have like problems, so who knows?

To tell the truth, toward the end of last year, you started to worry when they weren't blowing off the opposition by more then 30. That's how 'spoiled' we were.

That doesn't mean I'm happy, though.

The Boston Red Sox are a much more boring place without Manny. In the past, you could depend on a few goofy Manny shots to relieve the between-pitch boredom of baseball, but now you get the bland, unemotional Jason Bay, instead.

Don't get me wrong... Bay is a decent player, but he never sticks out his tongue at the camera and has yet to take a leak or make a phone call inside the Green Monster.

What else could he say, in all honesty. Was Manny just being too honest?

This is another one of these media fueled controversies. No surprise, Dan Shaughnessy of the Globe--separated at birth from his twin, Bozo the Clown--sticks his pudgy puss smack in the middle of it. Is there anyone out there in Beantown nott sick and tired of Danny-Boy's tirades against minority athletes?

He's as predictable as Rush Limbaugh, and twice as lame.

Oh, Dan can sure write. He puts the words together quite well. Maybe too well... stuck on himself, he can't resist making up stories when there's no story there.

In Dan's defense, every one in the media these days does the same thing... they make up news and then try to put themselves in the middle of it.

After the game was over, I said to May, "That was so intense, if my dad were still alive that game would have killed him."

Not sure where Randy Moss has been all our life, but I'm sure glad he finally got here. Moss was the difference maker in the game, the one non-QB you could point to and say, "He's the reason they were able to pull this out".

I have never seen a player with hands that can rip the ball out of the air like Randy can. When the ball is in the air, he goes for it as if he needs it.

I remember it was in January. We were 11 then, the winter of '59.

My friends' Dad took us, an Ice Capades/Celtics double-bill, on a Sunday. The basketball game was supposed to be first, but there was a snowstorm that grounded all air traffic in the northeast and the team had to bus it up from New York, where the night prior they had played the Knicks.

The Garden folks decided to go ahead with the ice show and had to strip down the parquet basketball floor and then take the plywood and tarp cover off the ice. After the ice show, they then had to recover the rink and reconstruct the basketball court, which was an extra added attraction for kids our age, I remember.