He says he feels better. He says he's actually felt pretty good for a couple of weeks now. But David Ortiz must feel great today, after his season-long slump ended with a Monster shot grand slam off the hapless Rangers to spark a 11-3 whupping. It was such a rebirth for Papi that his teammates gave him the "silent treatment" in the dugout usually reserved for rookies hitting their first homer. Other offensive highlights: a......

They worked hard enough in Game Two to go to OT. Last night, they took it a step further, as the Bruins beat Montreal for the first time since about 1982 in a thrilling 2-1 OT win at the Garden. It started with a Milan Lucic goal in the first period, giving the B's their first lead against the Canadiens since about 1995. Tom Kostopolous evened the score late in the second. So much for......

1-0. That's all that matters. Sure, Daisuke Matsuzaka pitched like he just got off the plane after a 19-hour trip. Papelbon was shaky. J.D. Drew got hurt. But look at the bright sides. Hideki Okajima upstaged his countryman and got the win. Manny's on pace for 648 RBIs. And J.D. was replaced by Brandon Moss, who hit the game-tying home run. In case you had cable or satellite problems, you weren't alone. And ESPN's GameCast......

Today, we're not going to talk about YouKnowWhat XLII. Because there's nothing to talk about. Today, we're going to celebrate two big wins from our two local winter teams. (We will remind you, however, that we'll be live-blogging YouKnowWhat XLII starting 7:30ish on Sunday. Get your commentin' fingers in shape.) The Celtics were facing maybe their toughest test of the season so far. There have been Negative Nellies all over the land saying that the......

In a sense, it's comforting. The Celtics went to battle against one of the other good Eastern teams without Kevin Garnett, and almost beat 'em. On the day of the C's' long-awaited return to national afternoon TV, the script ran eerily similar to the first game in Orlando; the Magic jumped out to a big lead, the Celtics clawed their way back, but ran out of gas at the end. Orlando's the only team to......

Let's say you're going to the Celtics-Timberwolves game tonight. If you're like most of the people at Celtics games these days, chances are you weren't there last year. Which is perfectly legal on your part. But there's something you should know. Most of the Timberwolves played here last year, during that long, miserable 06-07 campaign, and several of them - promising, hardworking youngsters for the most part - were sent away to make room for......

All right, we get it. Now we know that even if we check the Celtics score and see that they're up 14 on the Wizards with six minutes to go, we can't just take that for granted, switch back to the Lost Season 3 DVD and go to bed untroubled. We have to check again and make sure they sealed the deal. That will avoid surprises like last night, when we were troubled to hear......

Maybe some voters in Iowa had a tough decision to make; not so the AP NFL Coach of the Year voters, who swept Bill Belichick into the award with 29 out of 50 possible first-place votes. The other 21, we're sure, were dismayed by Spygate (why else vote against a guy whose team didn't lose?), figuring that any coach who had footage of 20 minutes of Jetball had an unfair advantage. Bill, we're sure, took......

Roger Clemens is an unhappy man today. At least, his lawyer is. Attorney Rusty Hardin responded to Roger's prominence in the Mitchell Report by saying, "He is left with no meaningful way to combat what he strongly contends are false allegations." We remember something in the report about Mitchell requesting an interview with Clemens and being turned down. Perhaps that was a mistake. For Clemens and the rest of the names on the list, it's......

Today has all the anticipation of postseason award announcements, with all the anxiety of a Law & Order episode. This afternoon, George Mitchell's going to go public with his steroid report. There's all kinds of stuff in there about making improvements to testing and recommendations for ways to keep this from happening in the future, but all anyone really cares about is the "naming names" part of the process. Who will be implicated? Sources say......

Seen on ESPN yesterday: "The Bruins are 8-4-1 in their last 13 games. Just thought you should know the fourth horse of the apocalypse is saddling up." The Bruins insist that Tim Thomas is not being Wally Pipped; he'll be the starter again as soon as he recovers from his groin injury. But for finding a backup goalie in the clearance bin, it's hard to beat what the B's have seen from Alex Auld, who......

We're not the biggest Japanese-movie-monster buffs in the world, but we honestly can't remember an entry in the series when the monster got to go home early because Tokyo didn't even make a token effort to defend itself. But Ghidorah was sent to the bench early last night; the "Big Three" were no longer needed amid the Celtics' utter annihilation of the listless Knicks last night. It was a 23-point lead at halftime, and when......

As tempting as it would have been for the Bruins to come out swinging last night, playing back the Flyers for Patrice Bergeron's concussion, that's not how they roll. And they needed the two points even more than they needed the visceral satisfaction of seeing the Flyers laid out like the wounded soldiers in Gone With the Wind. The 6-3 shellacking wasn't exactly a tea party, though. Defenseman Andrew Alberts left the game after a......

Not that it matters for the Celtics. Yes, in the department of "Who's the new guy? He looks kinda familiar," Celtics forward Wally Szczerbiak returned to basketball after a lengthy time-out. It looked like it might be a good night for the Celtics. They were matching Agent Zero and the Wizards (sounds like a '50s band name) through the third quarter. And then it all unraveled as Wizards did their thing, and the they defeated......

Bostonist has plenty of Pats and Dice-K action, but we've decided to show a little love to our other hometown teams with a sports wrap-up. Consider this Boston Sports Redux Beta. Bruins 4, Flyers 3 - Marc Savard was the hero of the evening as the Bruins bounced back after, frankly, having their butts handed to them on a platter by Toronto. Boston College 74, NC State 58. Boston College defeated NC State on......