Sports crazy

Go on down and stand in the Public Garden for a moment. Watch the swan boats drift lazily by. Admire the golden dome of the State House. There you will notice many things that Boston is. You will also notice many things that Boston is not. Principal among them, perhaps, you will notice that Boston is not Green Bay. Or Dallas.

Nevertheless, and much to our stupendous surprise, Boston and its environs have spent the past three years as, of all things, the admired epicenter of professional football. The New England Patriots -- once so underadmired hereabouts that they were forced to play a home game in Birmingham, Ala. -- have won two of the past three Super Bowls. Their coach, Bill Belichick, has risen to a cultlike status among the city's CEOs not dissimilar to the status enjoyed by the team's quarterback, Tom Brady, among sports radio hosts and teenage girls. The Patriots regularly register astonishing double-digits in television ratings, and, with their championships and their new $325 million stadium in Foxborough, the team's value is estimated to have tripled since Robert Kraft and his family bought the franchise for $160 million a decade ago.

''As I talk to people," says Jonathan Kraft, the owner's son and the team's vice chairman, ''they are all talking about dynasty-this-and-that, and we never say that. History will have to speak to that."

This comes as a shock to longtime residents of this rabid sports town for whom the universe has at its center the Boston Red Sox, a baseball team that once enjoyed a similar run of success to that currently enjoyed by the Patriots, albeit back in the latter days of the administration of President Edith Wilson. They are dueling symbols now -- the Patriots a symbol of modern success, and the Red Sox one of celebrated, historic competitive failure. (This year alone has seen the release of ''Still We Believe," an account of how the team lost last season, and an Emmy award for HBO's ''The Curse Of The Bambino," an account of how it had lost over the previous 84.) Now, though, the Red Sox payroll is rising toward $200 million, while the team continues to suffer agonizing losses like the one against the Yankees in the seventh game of last year's American League Championship Series. Meanwhile, the Patriots, with the National Football League's 10th-highest payroll, won their second Super Bowl last February. People are beginning to notice. It's a good thing the two teams get along so well.

''We're fortunate," says Red Sox CEO Larry Lucchino, ''in that both teams operate in a place that has the kind of passion for sports that we have around here, that's second to none in Western civilization."

Of course, the Patriots do not have the historic resonance that the Red Sox claim as a virtual birthright. There is a reservoir of generational support for the baseball team that seems inexhaustible, and that has allowed the Red Sox to weather the temporary competition from more successful local franchises, whether that be the Bruins of the 1970s, the Celtics of the 1980s, or the Patriots today.

''My family can be included in that intergenerational thing," says Jonathan Kraft. ''I can remember the first time I went to Fenway with my dad, and the Patriots weren't even around when he was a kid."

The Red Sox were here first -- 59 years before the Patriots, 45 years before the Celtics, and 23 before the Bruins. Long before anyone except thoroughbred horses and boxers participated in sports professionally hereabouts, the Red Sox had attached themselves to almost every aspect of the city, high society and low. A century ago, socialite Isabella Stewart Gardner was asked to remove herself from Symphony Hall because she'd festooned herself with a Red Sox banner. When he was mayor in the early 1900s, John ''Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald regularly went slumming at the ballpark with a boisterous proletarian claque called the Royal Rooters. By the time Honey Fitz's grandson, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was born in 1917, the Red Sox had already been a dynasty once.

This allowed the Red Sox to establish themselves as a peculiarly Boston institution, like the State House and Old North Church. This made them the great constant in Boston sports. While the Red Sox were not always successful either on or off the field, the long sweep of the team's history managed to sustain it through the lean years until the franchise finally took off for good again during the miraculous 1967 run to the American League pennant.

The other three Boston teams asserted themselves almost in turn. The Bruins were the city's showcase franchise in the early 1970s, while the Celtics rose again on two different occasions, but most spectacularly in the 1980s, in much the same way that the Patriots seem to own the city now. Significantly, the ascendancy of each of these teams was fueled by a single iconic star -- Bobby Orr for the Bruins, Larry Bird for the Celtics, and, most interestingly, Belichick of the current New England Patriots. This gave each in turn a single face to put on their success, which was effective in the short term for attracting the casual sports fan and the not-so-casual sporting dollar, but it also guaranteed that each team's perceived dominance of the market would have a shelf life measured by the length of that figure's career.

It is something of a paradox that the Red Sox have not had a toweringly iconic figure since the retirement of Ted Williams. The team, however, has reconfigured itself as a kind of interactive museum piece. The star of the Red Sox is the Red Sox, which provides for a more durable sort of devotion. They are what we have here the way Dallas has, well, football.

Ultimately, the most basic advantage the Red Sox have is that baseball is played on evenings like this one, and that, even in the softest twilight, it is still really hard to play. Witness Troy Brown, a Pro Bowl wide receiver and the offensive captain of the Patriots, trying his hand in the batting cage prior to a recent Red Sox night game against the Cleveland Indians. And he's having a little trouble. Pop-ups. Little dribblers down the first-base line. He may be one of the best at what he does in the football world, but here, he looks very much like a man trying to kill yellow jackets with a crowbar.

The assembled Red Sox are no help. They stand around the batting cage and offer suggestions. Some of them -- ''Head down!" ''Keep your hands up!" -- have something to do with hitting a baseball. The others have to do with activities the description of which might be frowned upon by, say, the FCC. Nevertheless, the fans in the lower boxes give Brown a fervent, if ragged, ovation when he comes out of the cage for good. There is something to being a Patriot that counts these days, no matter what you're doing or how badly you're doing it.

''Man, I was just trying to hit the ball," he says into a thicket of microphones. ''That wall out there is tough. I'll take going over the middle to catch a pass any day of the week."

It is suggested to Brown that in answer to the raucous advice he was getting from the Red Sox around the batting cage, he might come out and wave around those pretty rings that he won in 2002 and 2004, the rings that are similar to those that the Red Sox have failed to win in, what is it now?

Oh, yes.

Eighty-five years.

''Naw," says Brown. ''I'd never do it to those guys. That'd be too cruel."