Done in the voice of Dan O'Shaughnessy

Houston came, Houston saw, Houston conquered: And all Boston sports fans could do was cry into an alcoholic drink of choice salted by tears, indifferently chilled, and downed with breakfast, as per Boston tradition.

The Boston Red Sox were on the receiving end of a four game beat-down so massive, so complete and so emasculating that their players may well be joining the lines that I imagine must form every Friday afternoon at pharmacies across Beantown, men hopeful for a refill on their erectile dysfunction medicine of choice, their wives and girlfriends even more so.

It is not that Boston baseball fans care too much, it is that - without professional sports - there is little else to care about.  A hotbed of corruption, Boston is surrounded by a like-minded state - Massachusetts, and a like-minded region - New England, devoted to the dole, featherbedding, labor unions, cronyism and every institution devoted to stifling initiative or self-determination, which is why in Boston, fandom has little to do with an appreciation of athletic endeavor and the close attention to statistics that characterizes fans in most other cities, and everything to do with a ritualistic denial of the hopelessness of everyday life as a Bostonian.

And the despair of sports fans does not end with the humiliations inflicted on the common man by Boston's polity.  The Boston area itself, which features small islands of modern buildings that are pleasing to the eye, functional and well built, is otherwise surrounded by a dreary mass of "historical" buildings that stretch to the horizon in every direction from Beacon Hill.  And while every tenth building has been gilded in some manner in a never-ending effort to mask the decay, the whole sad jumble descends every day under the weight of a centuries-old accumulation of grime, not to mention a foundation mortally compromised by that insult to engineering and fiscal responsibility: The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. 

Note to the city fathers of Detroit, my childhood home: Designate every crumbling eyesore as "historical".  It works for Boston.

About the actual series between the Sox and the Houston Astros, perhaps the less that is said, the better.  I will only observe that I've not seen such a thoroughly predictable outcome since, well, last year, when the Sox were swept by the Cleveland Indians.  The young Astros - a veritable melting pot of talent and seething vitality - used the Boston Red Sox in a most unseemly manner, the petrified corridors of Fenway bearing witness not just to a changing of the guard, but a dreary pattern of failure likely to define the team for years, if not decades to come.

Meanwhile, down in Foxborough, Tom Brady is over 40, and there aren't enough under-inflated footballs, sabotaged intercom systems, stolen signals, pilfered playbooks or other creative criminality to compensate for the decrepitude, lack of talent and dearth of character that defines the Patriots' defense.

It's enough to make a sports fan look forward to hockey.