Thoughts of Boston ... a week later

There's a woman who works in my office a couple days a week when it's more convenient for her than working in her own office. She has a desk that she uses, and we like having her around.

So it was a little odd when I heard her sounding a bit harried on the phone last Monday, to the point where she seemed pretty upset. At the same time, I happened to be checking out Twitter when I saw the headline ...

... There had been explosions at the Boston Marathon.

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Not to get all Kevin Bacon, but as much as the Boston Marathon is obviously both a Boston event (they even hold it as part of a local holiday, Patriots' Day) and now one of the world's major marathons, it's a local event in almost all of the cities and towns in Massachusetts because most everyone is within a few degrees of someone who runs it. The closest I ever came was the year a co-worker of mine ran. It's also the only year I've followed the marathon all that closely, because I wanted to see how she was doing.

There was the woman running to raise money for the local hospital where she had surgery the year before, and the cop who ran in support of a local cancer patient.

And there was my sometime office-mate, whose sister's boyfriend was running.

Those were the people, and their families, and their friends, and their co-workers, who the bombers were after. They weren't just attacking the marathon; they were attacking us.

The explosions not only killed three and injured scores of others (a MIT police officer was also killed in a shootout with the suspects), but they frightened everyone and set off a series of frantic phone calls and text messages all across the state. All the people I've mentioned and their families were OK; obviously, many people were not.

And not only does almost everyone in Massachusetts have some connection to the marathon, lots of people know someone in or near Boston. It would have never occurred to me that anyone would have thought Mrs. Last Honest or I were in danger, since my office is 15 to 20 miles away, and my wife's work, which is near the marathon route, was closed for the holiday. (Side note: I won't be giving her grief about Patriots' Day for a while.)

But when I got home, there were messages on my Facebook page from a couple of my high school friends asking if we were OK, so I not only assured them that we were fine, I posted a general message saying we were fine.

But again, too many people didn't get to say that.

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I'm not sure if there are two major American cities (I said major, so sit down Tuscaloosa and Auburn, AL) as defined by a sporting rivalry as much as New York and Boston, especially on the Boston end. Maybe Manchester and Liverpool, Madrid and Barcelona or another soccer rivalry elsewhere in the world can make that claim, but I don't know if it exists here.

So that's why, even though all the expressions of support after the bombing were heartfelt and sincere, I think they meant a bit extra coming from New York, because it was the home of the Yankees reaching out to the home of the Red Sox.

And then the Yankees decided to play "Sweet Caroline." As far as audible tributes from one city to another, one fanbase to another goes, it was hard to top.


As a Yankees fan who lives near Boston, I could hardly have been prouder of my team.

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I'm not a big fan of Rene Rancourt, the Boston Bruins' national anthem singer. His enthusiasm and love for what he does is unmatched, but I just don't think he's that good a singer.

However, when I tuned in to the first Bruins game after the bombing, I figured Rancourt would deliver a stemwinder of a national anthem and pump his fist about 16 times, and I'd be OK with that. If ever a situation called for it, it was this one.

What he did though, was so much cooler. And he got how important it was.

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I'm writing this from a hotel room in Concord, NC, where my wife and I are on vacation. (In another side note, we were in San Diego when Whitey Bulger was captured and in Asheville, NC, when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was arrested for his alleged role in the marathon bombing. If authorities are looking to make an arrest in the Gardner Museum heist, Mrs. Last Honest and I have a hankering to go to London.)

So I missed David Ortiz's speech at Fenway.

I am not ... let me repeat, AM NOT ... a David Ortiz fan. But his speech? Perfect, f-bomb and all.

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I think that people who write and talk about sports tend to give them too much credit. The Saints winning the Super Bowl didn't fix New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The Yankees going to the World Series didn't heal all of the pain after 9/11, and the Tigers weren't going to save Detroit during the auto crisis.

And there's no number of "Sweet Caroline" or national anthem singalongs or anything else at a sporting event that will heal the wounded bodies or souls in Boston, although I would love to see some type of event where the runner who didn't get to finish the marathon could cross the finish line.

But do sports help in some way? Maybe because it happened so close to where I live, I've realized more than ever that they can.