New England’s Agony of Victory

I hate to be downbeat on this most upbeat of sports weekends, but the worst thing that could happen to New England would be to win the Super Bowl again.

This is a part of the country that’s always radiated foreboding, and a grim puritan pessimism still pervades everyday life. Even the traffic signs are broody and faintly ominous. In densely populated areas, the state-mandated speed limit is 30 mph. But instead of announcing the limit, as is done elsewhere, the signs read, “Thickly Settled,” a phrase full of lethargy and snow-covered doldrums. Slow down and soak up the melancholy.

Against this backdrop, all the victory parades that have been occurring here lately feel like a violation.

A few months ago the Boston Red Sox exorcised the Curse of the Bambino and won their first World Series in 86 years. Suddenly, the players who had broken the region’s heart over and over were America’s darlings. Johnny Damon, the bad-boy outfielder who had dubbed the team a bunch of “idiots,” was in People magazine and on Letterman.

Euphoria reigned -- for about a week. Then a weird, quiet sadness fell over this place. Few talked about it or said openly that they missed the Curse. But it wasn’t long before Red Sox bobbleheads and “Curse Reversed” T-shirts started turning up on the forlorn marked-down tables at the Stop & Shop.

New England is not California. Here, people know that having your heart broken repeatedly is more fun, in the end, than having all of your dreams come true. A few months ago, the national media marveled that deep-blue Massachusetts turns out to have the lowest divorce rate in the nation. But here it was no mystery at all: “People prefer to be miserable,” my Boston brother-in-law dryly observed. Because when you’re cursed and miserable, there’s always something to talk about in rueful communion with your neighbors, a place to lay blame. Once the curse is gone, you’re really on your own.

The defeat of Sen. John Kerry did nothing to fill the yawning despondency gap. New Englanders voted for Kerry in large numbers, but it was impossible to find anyone who really identified with the man. His lugubriousness seemed inauthentic, like something he’d acquired to fit in. The man windsurfs, after all. Kerry was never the standard-bearer of the region, and his loss brought none of the crabbiness or the bitter wallowing this place thrives on.

Worse yet is the governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, a handsome optimist who is on everyone’s short list for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008.

With utter disregard for the state’s saturnine traditions and culture, Romney often appears in public unabashedly smiling. Like the triumphant Red Sox (nearly all transplants from other regions), Romney not only pronounces his terminal Rs but emanates a sunniness fundamentally alien to the state he leads.

All of this winning isn’t merely robbing life in Massachusetts of its rich bleakness. It may be literally driving people away. According to recently released census data, Massachusetts was the only state in the nation to incur a net loss in population in 2004. Think about that: In a year that brought Massachusetts a Super Bowl victory and a World Series championship, along with the Democratic National Convention -- a trifecta other states only dream about -- thousands more people left the state than moved in.

Various experts chalked up the exodus to a sluggish local economy, but I think people sense that Massachusetts is losing its soul, and the more trophies the place takes home, the more folks are going to run in the other direction.

Fortunately, the Boston Globe, one of the last remaining bastions of old Yankee gloom, found a professor who could speak in appropriately hopeless tones. “Population loss is a pretty fundamental number,” Paul E. Harrington of Northeastern University told the newspaper. “When you start seeing that, you’re in West Virginia land.... I think we’re sowing the seeds of our long-term destruction here.”

Now that’s the spirit that made New England great. And you’ll see none of it in Jacksonville this weekend. Professional sports teams are not expressions of the regions they represent. They’re hired guns, machines for winning. And if the oddsmakers are right, the Patriots’ machine will notch another win for a region that doesn’t quite know what to do with it.