("We Were Victorious")

Do me a favor, if you've got the Dropkick Murphy's album, The Warrior's Code. Go ahead and put it on before you read the rest of this. It'll make sense in a bit.

Summer is coming up soon, and with the warm weather, I'm sure to take a two-hour drive up to the White Mountains at least once. Personally, I'll hike. So will thousands of other New Englanders. We'll probably scale Mount Washington, or scramble over some of the smaller, but still formidable mountains. I'll probably sit up at Lonesome Lake in Franconia Notch, reading the guest book at the hut and laughing at remarks by the Appalachian Trail through-hikers who didn't anticipate the wall that is Mount Moosilauke greeting them at the border of my home state.

In New England, this is called "fun." Sorry, "wicked fun."

About 600,000 of my fellow New Englanders call themselves Bostonians. They live in the city that gave birth to the American Revolution. Their ancestors were among the first abolitionists. And between the 1820's and the 1850's, the city swelled with Irish immigrants. Boston was infused with a people who had by then weathered the Vikings, British oppression, failed revolution followed by miserably failed revolution, and -- the event that drew them finally to American shores -- a potato famine.

And then in 1897, they started the Boston Marathon.

Where's that name come from: Marathon? Well, 25 miles north of Athens, the Greek army faced the Persians and won, driving back King Darius I and putting an end to the Persian army's first attempts at invasion. According to legend, a young soldier named Pheidippides was said to have run from the battlefield to Athens without stopping. Arriving in the city, Pheidippides declared, "Nenikēkamen (We were victorious!)" and then died.

So last week, at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, at 2:50 in the afternoon, two explosives went off. Killing three people. Dismembering fourteen others. Otherwise wounding over two hundred more. It was meant to… scare us?

Runners, after travelling a distance that killed the Greek soldier of legend, continued to run to the hospitals to give blood. Civilians and doctors ran to the blasts. A father named Carlos Arredondo, grieving for two sons lost to war and depression, rushed to the side of Jeff Bauman who had lost both legs in the blast. The stories don't stop there. Go out and look for them.

The Athens of America, the Cradle of Liberty, the City of Champions. It is why Americans are Americans, a city forged in the defiance of imperial rule bred a nation that lives to defy, and we've defied fear before. Who would think that spirit is weaker at its source?

So, if you played The Warrior's Code, did you get why I asked you to? It starts right away with the first two tracks.

We are the ones who will never be broken
We are the ones who survive
This is the sound that brings us together
You are the one by our side

-~-

It's another murderous right
Another left hook from hell
A bloody war on the boardwalk
And the kid from Lowell rises to the bell

The Dropkick Murphy's. And they're Boston's band. Is that a surprise?

"Nenikēkamen!"