Overrun

Aw for chrissakes! (It's Easter; just had to get that in.)

The CHB thinks no one outside Boston had heard or -- or cared about -- the Boston Marathon prior to last year's bombing.

Friends and relatives in other parts of the country could never be expected to understand any of it. We were the only ones who acknowledged Patriots Day and found nothing odd about a major league baseball game starting annually at 11 a.m. on the third Monday of April. We were the only ones who knew Clarence DeMar, Johnny Kelley, Billy Rodgers, the Hoyts, and Heartbreak Hill.

Seriously?

Has he not heard the names of the past winners? Lelisa Desisa Benti? Wesley Korir? Geoffrey Mutai? How many of these folks grew up with the O'Learys and the O'Malleys down on Center St in Rozzie?

The last time an American won the women's division was 1985; the men's was 1983, or about the last time The CHB went to the can without a cocktail in hand. This is a major international race, watched all over the world, the first leg (get it?) of the Marathon Grand Slam.

And no, contrary to Shank's melodramatic prose, the Marathon does not stand as "a symbol of American freedom and a population refusing to cower to terrorism." That would be the Freedom Tower.

No, the Marathon is an event, not a monument. And healing will come when overwrought sportswriters describe it for what it is, and nothing more.