Four years ago this week leading up to the Super Bowl That Shall Not Be Named, I published an article in the paper edition of Barstool Sports about how I hate the New York Giants, why I hate the Giants, the depth of my hatred for the Giants, the way I grew up hating the Giants and all the different ways I hate the Giants. It was all about growing up in New England in how I've had to tolerate living in the shadow of Big Blue my whole life.Surrounded by older guys like my friends' dads who rooted for the Giants before there was a Patriots and passed that insufferable trait along to my friends. And how for my whole life we've been subjected to Giants games in the Boston TV market each and every damned Sunday the Pats aren't on. How every day they've ever lost a game was a good day for me, even times when they were losing double-digit games a year. And how the time Joe Pisarcik coughed it up at the end to cost them the game against Philly is one of the happiest, most vivid memories of my very

“A mind that is anxious about the future is miserable.” -- Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger “Do not sit in the corner and sulk. It draws attention a negative way. Draw attention to yourself, but in a positive way.” -- Wedding Crashers Rule No. 6 “All the negativity that’s in this town sucks!” -- Rick Pitino You haven’t lived through as many bad times in Boston sports as I have without learning a thing or two about negativity. And how sometimes it’s not a bad thing; it’s completely justified. The 40 years when the Patriots were the laughingstocks of football. The days of the ridiculous Red Sox “curse” talk. The decade-and-a-half of dark ages between the 1986 Celtics and the 2001 Patriots. And of course, the Pitino Era itself. Sometimes what people call “negativity” is nothing but the rational reaction of a sane mind. But is now really the time for it? I’m talking specifically about your 2011-12

It turns out reports of the death of the Patriots Way were greatly exaggerated. You remember the idea of the Patriots Way of Doing Things, right? It’s something we used to talk about seriously -- with straight faces -- back about seven years ago. It was this notion that if you built a football team out of a bunch of hard-working, overachieving, high-character guys and got them to trust their coaches, trust each other and above all put the team first, you could beat teams with more talent and better combine numbers. Of course, not everyone bought into it. Even when February meant Super Bowl rings falling from the sky like snowflakes around here, the Boston sports media for the most part scoffed at the idea. The media said that the Pats were winning not because they bought into the team unity thing or they outworked everyone else or they were the best coached, but because they had the best athletes. As Dr. Evil himself, Ron Borges, is fond of saying, “It’s not the X's and

One man’s annual countdown of the biggest miscreants, jerks, psychos, losers, mental defectives, morons, habitual criminal offenders, dirtbags and nitwits of the year: 10. The Miami Heat Not that anyone noticed, but the NBA had a lockout this year. And if you’d been paying attention (note: I wasn’t) you’d know that no one personified the cause of the thing as much as LeBron James, Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade. It’s funny, but it turns out that guys who shell out hundreds of millions of dollars to buy a business don’t feel like having their millionaire employees dictate who they will and will not play alongside. Apparently they’d like to pick their rosters, and they were willing to stay out of business to keep that right. Go figure. Not that NBA owners are all the most sympathetic figures to begin with, but even Mark Cuban (a guy I happen to like; a self-made billionaire who likes to be the turd in the NBA’s punchbowl can drink from my canteen