BOSTON – Numerous Red Sox fans from Maine were among the estimated 3.2 million who celebrated Boston’s first world championship in 86 years at Saturday’s “Rolling Rally.”
Brothers Ron and Mark Plourde fulfilled a lifelong dream when they met on the outskirts of the city early Saturday morning to attend the parade.
“I don’t know if it was Wednesday night (when the Red Sox clinched the world championship) or Thursday morning, but he called and said I gotta be there’ and I said I’m going, too,'” said Mark Plourde, 40, of Sabattus.
The brothers watched from their vantage point near the Prudential Center on Boylston Street as Red Sox players from the past and present, as well as team owners, front-office personnel, and their families rolled by on Boston Duck Tours amphibious vehicles.
“The crowd was 10 to 15 people deep, and it was pretty crazy,” said Ron Plourde, a Lewiston native who is now head baseball coach at Skidmore College.
“It was tremendous,” he added. “It almost didn’t seem real. It’s everything you dream about and more in terms of how you’d want a sports accomplishment to happen.”
Ron made the three-plus-hour drive from Saratoga Springs, N.Y., to meet his older brother in Cambridge. Mark left Sabattus about 4:45 a.m. and reported little trouble getting into the city.
“It went a lot smoother than we expected,” Mark Plourde said. “I met my brother in Cambridge at the beginning of the Red Line and I thought it was going to be sardine city on the train, but it wasn’t that bad.”
“It was a blast,” he added. “I was pessimistic that this was ever going to happen, but it’s everything you dream about and more.”
Kyle Rhoads, a former assistant principal at Sherwood Heights in Auburn who lives in Windham, said the crowd was fairly well-behaved, though he saw some parade-goers break through a barricade and tear down a streetlight near where the duck boats entered the Charles River.
“It’s an unbelievable feeling,” said Rhoads, 34, “because of the fact that they didn’t win it here in Boston, but this is the way it would have felt if they’d won it in Boston.”
The biggest surprise, said Rhoads, was the appearance of Pedro Martinez’s small friend, Dominican-born actor Nelson de la Rosa, who has become an unofficial team cheerleader.
“He was there, all 29 inches of him,” he said.
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