After living in Massachusetts as long as I have, I like to think I’m cynical enough … and sorry to say I’m old enough … that nothing surprises me anymore. You say that Boston has more bacteria in the tap water than Tijuana? (And for that matter, more people who speak Spanish?) Yawn. You tell me the Gulf of Mexico has more petroleum on top of it than Pat Riley’s head? Huh? Did you say something? You mentioned that it’s almost summer and parts of Vermont just had 12 inches of Global Warming dumped on them? Come again?

Like I said, nothing shocks me anymore. Stuff that a couple of years ago seemed like they were right out of the Book of Revelations are just another day at the office. In “Wall Street,” Martin Sheen says, “I guess if a man lives long enough, he gets to see everything. And I mean everything.” And I’ve pretty much seen it all.

Or I thought so until I woke up in mid-May of 2010 and found myself living in a world where all of a sudden the Bruins are the hottest ticket in Boston. They’re the princes of the city. The ones everyone’s talking about at work in the morning. They’re Caesar and they doth bestride the narrow world like a colossus.

There’s no debating it. Bruins hockey is dominating the landscape at the moment. The Patriots are in the quiet part of their calendar year. We’ve pretty much caught onto the fact that for the Red Sox, “run prevention” was a euphemism for “clearing about $30 million of deadwood off our payroll and making a run at 2012.” And in spite of the fact that the Celtics are also in the second round of the playoffs, they have less chance of knocking the Bruins off the back page of the Herald than “Furry Vengeance” has of outgrossing “Iron Man 2” this weekend. It’s the Bruins town right now; the rest of us just live in it.

And you can’t underestimate how sudden and unlikely this turnaround is. For most of our adult lives, the B’s have been the afterthought. If you even bothered to give them thought after. For the last 20 years or so, mid-May has been a time to either watch the coach get fired, the best player get scapegoated, or just to have a good laugh at the expense of all the puckheads while they rationalized another quick bounce out of the playoffs with “stillagoodyear … plentytobuildon … stillagoodyear.”

But now? They’ve got us all hooked.

I mean, this time of year, we’re used to every seat in the Garden being empty. Only now, it’s because everyone’s on their feet screaming. Meanwhile, you flip to the Sox game between periods and you can hear the vendors trying to hawk $6 bags of Kettle Corn, guys 40 rows back in the grandstand blowing their noses, a little kids asking their parents if they can go home now. We’re living in Bizarro World.
It’s as if Superman woke up and found Aquaman running the Justice League. Or if Joey Bishop was all of sudden the leader of the Rat Pack. It’s like every chick in Boston coming to Cheers hoping to hook up with Cliff Clavin. It’s Zach and AC Slater showing up at Bayside High and finding Screech is the BMOC. If I can continue to beat the outdated pop culture references to death, the last time anyone went through a change this quick and dramatic, it was that fateful night when Laney Boggs took off her glasses and magically transformed into Rachael Leigh Cook in the landmark film “She’s All That.”

But of course Rachael had the love of Freddie Prinze, Jr. to help make the metamorphosis happen. The Bruins transformation is harder to explain. Back in March in this space, I declared them one of those unlikeable, unrootforable teams that doesn’t deserve our support. Like the Kevin Kennedy Red Sox or the Rick Pitino Celts. In the ultimate statement game against Pittsburgh, when they had every motivation in the world from avenging Matt Cooke’s cheap shot on Marc Savard to needing a win to secure a playoff spot to trying to proving their manhoods in front of the 1970 Big, Bad Bruins, the B’s came out and proved to the world that they had balls. The kind of balls that you usually find in the top of an aspirin bottle.

Now, here we are six weeks later and they’re playing the kind of tough, aggressive, inspired hockey we had no reason to think was possible. It defies explanation. Again with the pop culture references, the only thing I can equate it to is the “alternate timeline” plots in “Lost” where we see what would’ve happened if Oceanic 815 never crashed. Dennis Wideman goes from classic underachiever to overachiever with the flip of a switch. Milan Lucic was an injured non-factor all season. Now, he’s your Game 2 game-winner. Johnny Boychuk goes from P-Bruin to playoff hero. Miroslav Satan goes from the unemployment line to a legend overnight. Not even Sawyer turning out to be a cop or Benjamin being a high school teacher strains credibility that much.

But still the question remains: How have we found ourselves in this situation? How did the Bruins go from battling for our attention with the Head of the Charles Regatta and the Harvard Intramural Quidditch League to the biggest story of the year so far?
Well, I know less about hockey than probably anyone on this web site. But I do know a thing or two about useless information. So let me take a stab at explaining the whole phenomenon with two words: “Schrodinger’s Cat.”

Erwin Schrodinger was a physicist and a contemporary of Einstein’s. Einstein and some of his colleagues had come up with a set of quantum mechanics principles they called the Copenhagen Interpretations that, simply put, said that when you have a set of possible outcomes to a quantum physics equation, all the possibilities exist simultaneously. And all those possible outcomes only collapse into one when measured by scientists.

So Schrodinger, being the smartass of the bunch, came up with the following paradox: He said based on that model, if he built a box and put his cat inside, and he put into that box a device that would kill the cat or not kill it based on the random movement of one atom, then to the outside world, the cat is both alive and dead at the same time. And it’s only when an observer opens the box that we get one result or the other.

And that is how I explain this inexplicable turnaround of the Bruins. This Bizarro Universe where they’ve gone to irrelevant waste of our precious time to the toast of Boston overnight. That there were an infinite number of possible outcomes to this season, from missing the playoffs Claude Julien getting fired to catching fire and winning the Cup and everything in between. All it took was for us to open the box at the right time and finding that the is cat alive and well. And so far, so good.

Does it make any sense? Not at all. But when we live in a world where the Bruins are dominating the Boston sports landscape, nothing makes sense.