Winners

Josh Beckett became the ace, Randy Moss is the missing ingredient, and Kevin Garnett is as advertised. Has there ever been a better year to be a Boston sports fan?

For over 20 years, we were told that high-priced professional athletes looked on Boston as though it were Siberia, only with a poorer class of fur coats. Nobody wanted to play here. It was too cold. It was too nasty. And that was just the media. The center of sports gravity - like the centers of gravity in so many other areas - had shifted south and west, to balmier, golfier climes. Well, enough with that, we say today.

The central figures on all three of Boston's most successful sports teams were not even here when 2005 passed into 2006. A little over two years ago, Josh Beckett, Kevin Garnett, and Randy Moss were no closer to the Commonwealth than Mitt Romney is these days - or was back then, now that you mention it. Today, Beckett is a Red Sox World Series hero, Garnett is the main cog in the resurgent Celtics, and Moss is on a record-breaking pace with the untouchable Patriots. Boston is suddenly the destination of choice.

While all of them came as a result of a trade, rather than as true free agents, Moss took a pay cut to play here, and Garnett showed himself more than willing to be wooed. Once here, all three found something every professional athlete wants, whether it comes with a windchill or not - a stable organization for which to perform. With the Florida Marlins, Beckett won a World Series in 2003 and then watched his team get taken apart, because every small-market baseball team is a chop shop waiting to happen. Garnett never had the supporting cast in Minnesota that he has here, and Moss came to New England from the ongoing zoo that is the Oakland Raiders - although, to be fair, Moss's own contributions to said zoo were not inconsiderable. Now they're here, happy and healthy, and if Phoenix doesn't like it, then Phoenix can, well, pound sand.

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