Remember the days when all of the Boston sports teams weren’t finishing atop the standings? As recently as 2000, none of the four major Boston teams qualified for their respective league’s playoffs.

Those days might be long gone with all the young talent on the Sox and Bruins, Jerod Mayo terrorizing opponents’ offensive lines for the Pats, and Rondo taking over during the playoffs.

Could Boston be turning into the new New York – the most hated place in the rest of the sporting universe?

These guys are not the first ones to raise the subject.

Back in 2005, Greg Garber of ESPN had this to say after the Patriots collected another Super Bowl trophy.

And with Bill Simmons writing about Boston’s teams almost every week in his columns, there’s no end in sight for sports dominance in Beantown.

But what about New York, the city that until recently was winning championships left and right? Besides the G-Men’s improbable Super Bowl in 2008, what else do they have going for them?

The Yankees have had pretty much zero positive news out of their clubhouse since their infamous collapse in 2004. Their fans seem to want to complain about anything and everything even after they go out and spend $400 million in the offseason. (Seriously, isn’t it common knowledge to an average fan attending a game that there is no re-entry?)

MSG’s Knicks and Rangers could be looking even worse. The last time that the Knicks made the playoffs was in 2003-2004, and the Rangers seem to be having more problems with their coach than even the most troublesome player in the league.

Things have gotten so bad with the Knicks that Stephon Marbury, once a player who was brought to New York as a centerpiece, was run out of town in a very peculiar way by his team’s own front office. He had to plead to come to Boston for limited minutes as a willing role player off the bench. Now, after it seemed like he didn’t have much to offer to the C’s, he has come up big in the playoffs, scoring 12 points in the 4th quarter during Game 5 with the Magic, and may have resurrected his career with that performance in the Hub.

On the diamond, imagine what Sox fans would have done if their team blew the division on the last day of the season two years in a row. The Mets completed that very feat the past two seasons and to top it all off, closed their stadium by driving their fans off the edge.

After all those years of Red Sox heartbreak, it seems that the winning ways might be around for a while.

The latest evidence is the newest member of the Sox bullpen, Daniel Bard. In his first outing last night, he dominated an Angels offense that had already put up 7 runs in the game against the best Sox starter this year, Tim Wakefield. Barring the unthinkable, Bard looks like yet another stud from the farm.

So with both the Bruins and Celtics playing tonight for the right to move on to the conference finals of their respective sports, what’s going on in New York tonight?

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