Good Eggs

Back in the 1960s, as I delivered the morning Boston Globe out of a canvas sack, I was taking lessons from professors of the sporting press. The faculty included Bud Collins, Harold Kaese, and Ray Fitzgerald, eminences most eminent. Kids like me were Sox fans foremost, also partisans of the Patriots in the go‑go American Football League. Young Bobby Orr and his Bruins were winter wonders, and Red, Russ, Cooz, and Hondo’s Celtics were grandmasters. As my friend Dan Shaughnessy, today a legend of the Globe himself — a guy who, unbeknownst to me, was growing up one town over, also learning at the knee of Collins, Kaese, and company — puts it: in spring, the birdies and Sox would fly north, the forsythia would bloom on Boston Common, and the Celtics would win another championship. The Sox always lost, even when the Impossible Dream season of 1967 somehow delivered us to game 7.

Personally, I was something of a wintertime exotic. Here was an eastern...