After three long months of waiting, the duck boats will be rolling through Boston again on Tuesday. The New England Patriots fired up another championship celebration with their sixth Super Bowl win Sunday, tying the NFL record.

It wasn’t the prettiest championship of the Kraft-Belichick-Brady Era, but winning is never ugly. New England’s defense was stout and Brady engineered a fourth-quarter drive that was good enough for the Patriots to hoist the Lombardi Trophy once again.

It was the biggest story of the day, or week, or month. Nothing comes close to the Super Bowl, an event that overshadows everything else in sports. Boston’s remarkable run of success continued with the win at Atlanta.

If you looked into the shadows, there were other great stories for Boston sports fans over the past couple of days.

The Celtics looked the part in a 134-129 win over Oklahoma City on Sunday at the Garden. Kyrie Irving scored 30 points and added 11 assists as Boston snapped the Thunder’s seven-game winning streak. The Celtics have won four straight and 9 of 10, the lone loss in that stretch coming at the hands of the two-time defending NBA champion Golden State Warriors.

In the NBA, you’re only as good as your best players. Irving is Boston’s best player, and he has suddenly become the center of a controversy over his future. Will he stay in Boston? No one knows for sure. And, if he’s not, should Danny Ainge consider a trade before he walks?

Not if Ainge wants a crack at the Warriors again in June. The Celtics reminded us that they have the talent to compete with anyone. They came into this season as the prohibitive favorites in the East. Irving’s long-term future is worrisome, but the short-term reality is that he needs to be playing here, and playing well, if the Celtics want to go deep into the playoffs.

Meantime, the Bruins were in Washington beating the Capitals 1-0. It was a noteworthy win for Boston, its first against the Capitals since 2014. Tuukka Rask stopped 24 shots in the shutout, and showed us all that he has recovered from whatever concussion symptoms he was dealing with last week.

When healthy, the Bruins are good enough and young enough to battle for home-ice advantage in the first-round of the playoffs. If Rask stays healthy and plays like he can they’ve got the type of goalie you can ride deep into the playoffs.

Yet GM Don Sweeney knows this team needs more scoring. Their top line is one of the best in the league. Sweeney owes it to this team to add a Top 6 scorer to round out the second line. With a little more offensive punch the Bruins could take us for a nice playoff ride in May.

The Red Sox won’t be playing a meaningful game until late March, yet a small glimpse of spring was in the air Monday when the team’s equipment truck pulled out of Fenway Park and headed to Fort Myers, Florida. The Red Sox are looking to repeat after a record-setting season in 2018, and have brought most of their players back for the coming season.

This is a stark contrast to other recent Sox championship teams that saw major changes in the months following their World Series wins. Dave Dombrowski re-signed World Series MVP Steve Pearce and fan favorite Nathan Eovaldi to complement the core of returning players.

The biggest difference between last year’s team is the one that will assemble in southwest Florida next week is the back end of the bullpen. Joe Kelly is a Dodger and Craig Kimbrel is a free agent, and while the Sox feel they have enough depth to fill that void it would be a shame to see a team built to win it all fall victim to insufficient relief options.

Still, the Red Sox will enter the season as one of the top teams in the league. Which means there is reason to daydream about the next duck boat parade, even as we wait for the latest one to take to the streets.

Tom Caron is a studio host for Red Sox broadcasts on NESN. His column appears in the Portland Press Herald on Tuesdays.

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