FOXBOROUGH, Mass. - - Bob Clark is standing a few hundred feet from Gillette Stadium, home of the New England Patriots, when he predicts that the team he has supported for decades will lose Sunday's playoff game against the Ravens.
It doesn't faze Clark offering up such doomsday conjecture. He knows that the end of football season marks the unofficial beginning of hockey and basketball seasons. And the teams representing Boston in those sports have as much - if not more - of a shot than the Patriots to bring the area its sixth professional sports championship since 2001.
Indeed, while the Orioles hope to rebound from their 12th straight losing season, the Ravens remain Baltimore's sole hope to hoist a championship trophy. But times are better than ever some 400 miles north.
It's where all four professional sports teams have at least a puncher's chance to bring New England another title.
"It's a good possibility we won't win, and I'll be the first to admit it," Clark, 73, of Braintree, said of the Patriots. "If it doesn't happen, I'm going right to the Bruins."
A lot of fans here point to Jan. 19, 2002, as the beginning of the sports magic.
It's the day many believe the fortunes of the local sports teams changed after the Patriots beat the Oakland Raiders on a disputed play in the snow. New England advanced to the AFC championship game and went on to upset the favored St. Louis Rams for the first of three Super Bowl championships in a four-year span.
Since then, the previously long-suffering Boston Red Sox have won the World Series twice, and the Boston Celtics won their 17th NBA championship in 2008.
The run of success for one area's professional sports teams is unprecedented. And it left fans in major cities equally envious and curious as to how this region continues to have such remarkable luck.
Championship dreams spill over from season to season here.
Still, Clark believes the Ravens' ability to run the ball and stop the run gives them an edge in this matchup against the Patriots. That should lead to a strong Ravens playoff push, a year after falling one game short of a Super Bowl berth, he said.
But if that doesn't happen, woe is the Baltimore sports scene until football training camp starts in July. The Orioles look years away from a legitimate run at a title after coming close to losing 100 games last year.
There is some hope, says Chris Price, who hosts a sports talk radio show for WEEI in Boston. If the Orioles can challenge the Red Sox and New York Yankees for a division title sometime soon, expect the Mid-Atlantic region to rival New England in fan craziness, he said.
"I know Baltimore, from my experience there, is a great sports town," said Price, who used to work at the Orioles Store in Washington in the early 1990s. "There is a passion. People love football and baseball, and when Baltimore has a winner on its hands, it's a great town."
Price left the Baltimore area and moved back to New England in 1994. He has seen the doldrums of the late 1990s Boston sports scene and the current rise to elite status in all four sports.
"There is no lag time," Price said. "It's literally jumping from one big event to another: World Series, Super Bowls, NBA Finals. It's exciting and exhausting. But I'm sure a lot of cities wish to have these problems."
The NHL's Bruins finished with the best record in hockey last year and are now in second place in the Northeast Division - playoff-bound if the season were to end today. The Celtics are vying for the top seed in the NBA's Eastern Conference, and with their best player, Kevin Garnett, back from an injury that sidelined him for the playoffs last year, the team looks like the favorite to win the conference.
But even if both teams fail, the Red Sox have reloaded and look poised to challenge the defending champion Yankees as spring training opens at the end of next month. The Red Sox made the playoffs last fall but lost in the opening round.
Boston is the only city where all four teams made the playoffs last year.
Sometimes, listening to the locals can be a little nauseating, according to David Weibe, a Ravens fan living in Boston. Although the Ravens have been one of the NFL's better franchises the past 10 years, winning the championship after the 2000 season and making the playoffs six times during that span, those accomplishments only give Weibe so much ammunition when it comes to bragging rights.
"I wouldn't say I'm envious, but I'd like to break the ducks with one of my teams winning something," said Weibe, 27, who works as a financial consultant and is attempting to go to Sunday's game. "It would be nice if the O's had a winning season. So I'll stay tight-lipped until that happens, then I'll rub it in their face."
Kyle Maley, 29, moved to South Boston four years ago after graduating from Towson University. Maley, a lifelong Baltimore sports fan, has stayed true to the Ravens and Maryland basketball but ditched the Orioles in favor of the Red Sox.
"That's the one team when you do come here, it's hard not to get excited about them," Maley said. "It's obviously exciting to watch. There is a postseason to watch every year."
Financially, the winning has made Boston merchandise a hot product.
In 2008, the Patriots opened a sprawling team Pro Shop next to the stadium, a three-story palace dedicated to all things New England, including a team Hall of Fame. Mike Perriello, manager of the Pro Shop, said the Patriots' fan base grew rapidly after Bob Kraft bought the franchise in the 1990s. "That [2002] Super Bowl was the first thing sports fans really sunk their teeth into since the 1980s Celtics," Perriello said. "The Patriots, from a retail point of view, the fan base was already building but ... the Super Bowls propelled it."
In 2004, the Red Sox won their first championship since 1918 and tacked on another three years later. The Celtics revamped their roster, adding Garnett and All-Star Ray Allen and were the best team in basketball in 2008.
Has the winning led to arrogance in this area? Not so, according to Douglas Rizzuto, who is a Patriots season-ticket holder and remembers when New England went 1-15 in 1990, in the midst of five straight losing seasons, and the Celtics were a middling team for 15 years after Larry Bird retired in 1992. "Never would I have imagined we'd have the Celtics, Red Sox and Patriots in the mix, and I feel pretty blessed as a sports fan," Rizzuto, 39, said. "I'm more used to being persecuted. So I never talk junk, and I don't think I could be too used to or spoiled by what we have."