To Brittany Shepard, life without a Boston sports championship every year or two is like the days before text messages and Twitter: a bygone era she simply cannot fathom.
“No, I don’t remember,” Shepard, 19, said about that time before championship trophies were taken on tours of New England’s old mill cities and bucolic towns, and championship banners hung from rafters.
“Boston sports have had an amazing dominance and it’s always been that way to me. It’s kind of like a way of life,” she said.
That way of life is a relatively new concept here. For decades, New England fans sported a collective identity as losers — the timeworn phrase had been “long-suffering losers” — while the Red Sox, the Bruins and the Patriots delivered many calamities, but zero championships.
However, this city has ridden an unprecedented wave of success over the past decade: The Bruins’ victory in the Stanley Cup finals on Wednesday night made Boston the first city to win championships in all four major sports within a 10-year span.
With the Patriots’ Super Bowl victories in 2002, 2004 and 2005; the Red Sox’ World Series titles in 2004 and 2007; the Celtics’ NBA title in 2008; and now the Bruins’ triumph, Boston has gone from Loserville to Titletown, just like that.
“This is sort of a golden age, isn’t it, of sports here,” said Richard Johnson, curator of the Sports Museum of New England.
Perhaps the golden age is sweeter for those who predate it — those New Englanders who might not consider a major sports title a birthright on the order of New York Yankees fans and Duke basketball fans.
“For older generations, it has a greater importance,” Shepard said. “It’s amazing to see, but we just don’t have that history behind it. I always had to listen to what my mom said, which is to take it all in, because you don’t know how long it’s going to be until you win the next one.”
Rooting for Boston teams was ingrained in Shepard while growing up in Cheshire, Massachusetts, a town of about 3,500 in the Berkshires.
Her mother is a fervent Red Sox fan, and Shepard became one as well, a passion matched only by her love for the Bruins. She also follows the Celtics and the Patriots, but to a lesser extent.
“It’s unbelievable that it’s been so long,” Shepard said of the Bruins’ last Stanley Cup victory, 39 years ago.
Since the Patriots opened the floodgates in 2002, championships have been like the New England weather: If you want something different, just wait a little while. And while Shepard revels in it, there’s one thing she doesn’t like: fans who jump on the bandwagon, only to fall off when the trophy has to depart for another city.
Johnson said the resurgence of Boston sports teams coincides with the advent of social media, creating a group of young fans who not only watch their favorite athletes play sports, but read their thoughts on the Internet and even pretend to be them in video games.
“The relationship between the fans and the teams has grown closer even as it has grown farther” in the age of multimillion-dollar contracts, Johnson said.
“Boston is the Hollywood of sports,” he said. “Sports matter here. Lots of teams, not just the big four, have an audience and a constituency.”
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