After Chad and David

Everywhere I turned, in the newspapers or from the talking heads on the tube, someone was telling me to get over it, to move on. Monday's principals, Fleet boss Chad Gifford and his new boss, Bank of America's Kenneth Lewis, told us this was good for us. Nearly everyone -- from Paul Guzzi, president of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, to Paul Grogan, head of the Boston Foundation -- was singing off the same page: This is happening everywhere. Make the best of it. It was "inevitable."

I don't think so. No, choices were made. And mistakes, too. And those choices and mistakes -- and some bad luck, to be fair -- help explain the loss of two irreplaceable pillars of corporate Boston.

Inevitable? I'll defer to a higher authority, Chad Gifford.

"Remaining an institution based in Boston is important to me, but that's only possible if we perform," Gifford told the Globe in December 2001. In the next year, the roof fell in on the bank. Latin America went south. Fleet closed its high-tech investment bank, Robertson Stephens. The private equity business got crushed. And the bank faced a mountain of bad corporate credits.

Fleet, in particular the pieces it inherited from BankBoston, was a bank built for speed in the late '90s, and when the boom went bust, so did the bank. Only when Fleet stumbled did it become inevitable that it would sell when the recovery came and a suitor stepped up with an irresistible premium. In recent months, Fleet talked seriously with Bank of America and Wachovia, both based in Charlotte, N.C., and Citigroup in New York. Fleet took Bank of America's 40 percent premium, a good deal for shareholders.

Hancock made its own choices. The most critical decision was to demutualize and go public three years ago. When it was hit with big writedowns in its bond portfolio, similar to those at Fleet, chief executive David D'Alessandro went shopping for a buyer with new urgency. Again, the shareholders did well. Hancock was hardly alone among insurers going public, but others did not and continue to prosper. MassMutual Financial Group comes immediately to mind.

It's fine to look to the future with optimism, but it's worth remembering what was lost, too. Fleet and Hancock were the kind of good corporate citizens every community wants and needs. Neither was without fault -- Fleet's customer service problems are legendary -- but both were rooted deeply in this community. Few executives, through their words and deeds, have been more important in this town in recent years than Gifford and D'Alessandro. Neither will be in his current job in two years.

Does it matter that we are losing our local business institutions? Marshall Carter, who ran State Street Corp. so well for so long, is convinced it does. In the mid-'90s, when Bank of New York came after State Street, "We could have caved easily," Carter says, but the bank did not. "Over time, these kind of things have a devastating effect on a community even though they make commitments to maintain things in the short term," he said. "Bottom line, I am not convinced the case for bigness has to go in the direction of selling out."

So, like that loss to the Yankees in the seventh game of the playoffs, I'll get over it. I'll move on. But that doesn't mean I have to like it.

Steve Bailey is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at 617-929-2902 or at bailey@globe.com.