As Greg Curry loaded firewood on a trailer Sunday morning for delivery to his mother’s house, the Dover-Foxcroft man and avid Boston Red Sox fan couldn’t help bring up the subject that has come to epitomize his favorite team’s current playoff plight.

“Why Timlin,” he lamented a scant few hours after the veteran righthander had given up the deciding run in Tampa Bay’s 9-8, 11-inning victory over Boston in Game 2 of the American League Championship Series.

Those two words – along with “Fran-coma” and a few other catchphrases have been panning throughout New England since then, as Game 2 became a “game-changer” in the series, to use a favorite phrase from this year’s political debate parlance.

The upstart Rays have been overpowering since that narrow escape, using a barrage of home runs to out-Fenway the Red Sox 9-1 and 13-4 and take a 3-1 lead in the best-of-seven series.

Which, one could make the case, is just where the Red Sox wanted things, given their dramatic comebacks from 3-0 down against the New York Yankees in the 2004 ALCS and from 3-1 down against the Cleveland Indians just a year ago.

Of course, by the time you read this, the 2008 playoff run could be history, with Tampa Bay needing only to win Thursday night’s Game 5 at Fenway to earn its first trip to the World Series.

And if not, there are Games 6 and 7 this weekend.

But such a scenario is a good example of how times have changed for the New England sports fans of the new millennium, for where once we were denied, now we have become spoiled.

Before that 2004 miracle comeback against the Yankees followed by the anticlimactic sweep of the St. Louis Cardinals – ouch! – in the World Series, Red Sox Nation might as well have been printed all in lower-case letters, given the futility and heartbreak of the team’s quest to end a championship drought that had endured since 1918.

And it’s not just the Red Sox.

Until Mo Lewis of the New York Jets took out Drew Bledsoe and Tom Brady – an unheralded sixth-round draft choice from Michigan who split time as a quarterback while with the Wolverines with Drew Henson – arrived on the scene, the New England Patriots were best known perhaps for getting splattered by the Chicago Bears’ Super Bowl Shufflers in the 1986 Super Bowl.

Now they are three-time Super Bowl champions, and within a last-minute David Tyree helmet catch of a fourth last February.

Then there are the Celtics. Eighteen months ago the collective fandom argued mostly about who should be fired first, head coach Doc Rivers or GM Danny Ainge. It had been a generation since a championship banner had been raised to the rafters in the old Boston Garden, 1986 to be exact, and prospects for Banner 17 seemed especially dim.

But then came the trades for Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett to join holdover Paul Pierce as a modern-day Big Three, and now the Celtics not only are the reigning NBA champs, but favored to contend for another crown this winter.

Just think, if not for the Patriots’ last-minute defensive misfortunes against the New York Giants, New England might be holding all three major professional titles.

Which I suppose just makes “Why Timlin” all the more the profanity of the moment, because we all have grown quite accustomed to the championship feeling – and quite unfulfilled with anything less.

eclark@bangordailynews.net

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