Deep In The Heart Of The City

A standing ovation for finishing lunch.

"It was something to see," Richie Zapata said. "Jay Leno ate here. Leonardo DiCaprio. Rene Russo. Never happened with any of them."

It happened here.

It happened now.

It happened with a couple of the Bruins. Just the way things like that used to happen all the time.

These guys are going to see what it's like," said Derek (Turk) Sanderson, long-ago Bruin, part of the last two Stanley Cup champions, in 1970 and '72, the teams that stitched and stamped the Bruins into the fabric of Boston life. "Good for them. They're going to get a taste of how good it can be around here."

A forgotten strand of DNA has kicked back to life. Memories have been stirred. The game and the team that captivated a previous generation—jesus saves, espo scores on the rebound, the bumper stickers read—are captivating the newest generation. Urban renewal has come to what locals consider the foremost hockeytown in the United States. The Bruins are good again, shooting for a moon that for so long had seemed out of reach.

After 21 years they are in a Stanley Cup final. If they can beat the Canucks, they will win their first NHL title in 39 years.

The Patriots won three Super Bowls in the past decade. The Red Sox finally won two World Series in that time, ending an 86-year curse and sending people celebrating into the streets. The Celtics won a 17th world championship. Six championships in 10 years. Six duck boat rides down the city streets. The Bruins won nothing. They stumbled and fell, stumbled and fell again. They fell hard, fell easy, always fell again.

"Where do you start with the disappointments?" Heather Steadman, a veterinary technician from Gloucester, Mass., a season-ticket holder for 36 years, asked. "I go all the way back to when we got Brad Park to play with Bobby Orr and we were going to win Cup after Cup, and Orr got hurt and it never happened. Too many men on the ice in 1979. Edmonton, the fog on the ice, the three-overtime game in 1990. I remember living and dying with Cam Neely, my favorite player of all time. They had Neely, Ray Bourque and Adam Oates. If all three were healthy at the same time, they never lost. Except they weren't all healthy at the same time much at all."