Sports Redux: "At Least We Didn't Get Booed Out Again"

Yes, the Bruins managed to achieve this modest goal yesterday, treating their fans to an actual win. A win that really matters, even, since the 2-1 decision over the Rangers pushed New York down to five points out of the playoffs and helped the B's keep a one-point lead over the hot Thrashers for that final spot.

Miroslav Satan and Dennis Wideman scored for the Bruins, and Tuukka Rask stopped 23 of 24 Ranger shots to get the win and get a little goodwill back for a team that really needed it. Coach Claude Julien summed it up: "We need to stick up for each other as a team, and we haven’t been the best at it this year. That’s a fact. I think everybody knows that, including ourselves." Their next game is against those hot Thrashers, so the time to step up and fix that seems to be now.

How's your bracket? Since only one of the eight Sweet Sixteen games features the two highest-possible seeds (that would be #1 Duke vs. #4 Purdue in the South region), it's probably full of red ink. But that's OK; ESPN says that only four of 4.78 million brackets submitted to their site had 15 of the 16 correct and nobody had all of them. So you might as well root for Cornell, Northern Iowa and (we can't stress this enough) St. Mary's to keep knocking off favorites.

With impatience mounting in Fort Myers for the actual season to start, there's not much to talk about in Soxland. The Globe does look over some roster issues, and Surviving Grady alerts us to a potential facial-hair debacle that fans can help prevent.