Five years ago today, Patriots Day in Boston dawned sunny with a chill still in the air. An institution in Maine and Massachusetts, the holiday honors the first battles of the Revolutionary War and hosts both the Boston Marathon and the traditional 11 a.m. Red Sox game. The ritual is to catch the Sox at Fenway, right around mile 25 of the marathon, before walking the short way downtown to catch the final part of the race.

The typically festive atmosphere of Patriots’ Day was interrupted in 2013 by a pair of bombs, 12 seconds apart just shy of 3 p.m., near the marathon’s finish line on Boylston Street. Planted by brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the bombs left three people dead and hundreds injured, many with missing limbs.

For the next five days, the city was on edge and even on lockdown. Not until Friday night, when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was apprehended after he and his brother engaged law enforcement in an extensive manhunt, was the city able to breathe again.

During that week and the rest of that season, the Red Sox became a symbol of the city’s resilience, their traditional serifed B incorporating itself in the Boston Strong logo. They visited hospitals, they honored victims and they won the World Series.

This is the story of that week, as told by those Red Sox.

For those who didn’t grow up in New England or watching the Red Sox, it’s hard to describe what Patriots Day means to the city.

Don Orsillo (NESN broadcaster): Even as a kid, it’s just a special day — one of those days that’s very Boston. It’s unique from anywhere else. Nobody else plays that morning game. It was always very special.

Sam Kennedy (Red Sox team president): It’s always been my favorite day of the year, literally. We were so excited to not have school first of all, and when we were old enough starting about age 11 or 12, we’d take the T down to Fenway and get in somehow and then we’d always just pour out to Beacon Street and run around. It was a really special day.

Torey Lovullo (Red Sox bench coach): The one thing that stands out to me is the energy of the day. That’s what I’d heard of it, and then I was getting a chance to experience it, and it lived up to every expectation.

Andrew Bailey (Red Sox closer): Patriots Day takes Fenway to a whole different level.

Even members of the Red Sox front office got to relax a little bit more on Patriots Day.

Ben Cherington (Red Sox general manager): Being in the office, both Dan Duquette and Theo [Epstein] made a point of trying to get everyone to get out of work as soon as the game was over or early that day to go experience it. It was a day we all looked forward to.

Kennedy: Usually right after postgame, we typically would go downstairs to Game On [the bar connected to Fenway Park] and watch the postgame and then have pizza and beer and then make our way to the finish line. For about a decade, that was kind of the tradition for a lot of us in the front office.

After a woeful 2012 season, the Red Sox had changed managers and overhauled their personnel. Cherington emphasized the importance of a strong start, and Boston’s walk-off win over the Rays on Patriots Day lifted the team’s record to 8-4. Spirits were high as the team boarded its buses, waiting to head to the airport and a three-game series in Cleveland.

Will Middlebrooks (Red Sox third baseman): All of a sudden, our three police escorts on motorcycles turned on their sirens and sped away.

David Ross (Red Sox catcher): You look around and the cops are disappearing at an alarming rate.

Orsillo: We’re so used to those guys. They’re always there, and you recognize a lot of the guys. We had never seen them leave before. And we’re sitting there wondering what’s going on. You knew something not good was happening.

Jonny Gomes (Red Sox outfielder): Getaway day is uni off, shower, suit, food, grab your shit. You’re not on your phone. It wasn’t until we got on the bus with Twitter that we started to see some of the pictures.

Cherington: First you hear the word explosion, and you don’t really know that that means. Maybe it’s not a big deal.

Initially, many Red Sox figured the explosions were accidental — a gas leak or a construction accident, “something that happens in a city,” Gomes said. Traveling secretary Jack McCormick, a former cop himself, briefed the team on the bus about what had happened.

Middlebrooks: A walk-off win in the big leagues is one of the most exhilarating feelings, especially in Fenway Park. And then less than an hour after that being overcome with fear, confusion and sadness was overwhelming.

Lovullo: Once we got outside there was total chaos. I could see people running in different directions at full speed. I knew at that point that things didn’t look good.

Dustin Pedroia (Red Sox second baseman): I remember confusion. Nobody knew what was going on. You couldn’t get a hold of anyone.

In the immediate aftermath of the bombs, networks around the city were overwhelmed by demand. Cellphone calls struggled to get through. Players were unable to get in touch with their families, many of whom had left them at the ballpark with an idea of heading to Kenmore Square or Boylston Street.

Ross: My wife and kids had come to the game and saw me off on the walk back to our apartment, and I went into panic mode on what’s going on and where are they. Your mind kind of races and goes to bad places with all that was going on.

Daniel Nava (Red Sox outfielder): You start to realize how dependent you are on your cell phone when you can’t use it.

Bailey had blown the save in the top of the ninth inning — as celebrated a Red Sox blown save as Fenway has ever seen, in retrospect.

Bailey: When we came back, sitting in the bullpen, fans would come up to me and, ‘Thanks for blowing that save. We were going down that way.’ You never know what would have happened, and I really don’t like thinking about it.

On the bus ride to Logan, Red Sox players were as exposed to rumors as anyone in Boston.

Gomes: The big thing was all the rumors. There was a rumor there was [a bomb] in the building where a lot of our families lived. And then of course we’re the Red Sox. There’s our plane. If they’re going to do multiple explosives at the marathon finish line, anywhere’s an option. Why wouldn’t you believe all of these rumors?

Mike Napoli (Red Sox first baseman): There’s a scared part to it. There’s an ‘Is this real?’ part to it. You’re pretty nervous because you don’t know what’s going on or what people planned.

Ross: You didn’t know how widespread it really was.

It wasn’t until the team got on its plane to Cleveland that players were able to contact their families. The flight was short but somber.

Orsillo: As quiet a plane as I can ever remember. Quieter than any loss or anything coming home from a playoff scenario. Guys were just wrapped up in it, watching it.

Gomes: Maybe it’s time that baseball is not that important. If we were to cancel the season, I’m OK with that, because it was that big. Maybe it’s just time to take our life-is-on-the-line mentality and give it back to the community. We obviously approached every single game after that the same, but I wasn’t sure right away. What are we battling for versus what they’re battling for? The people that got injured? To tell you the truth, there was a hangover there.

Nava: Baseball is a great game, baseball for Boston is something that has a lot of tradition and a lot of history. When you start to hear that people have lost their lives, people have lost limbs, that puts baseball — a game — in perspective.

After landing in Cleveland, the Red Sox gathered for a team dinner. For the next six months, manager John Farrell would cite this night as the moment he knew he had a special team.

Cherington: Early-season road trips are, even in a normal year, usually a good opportunity for team bonding and to really start to figure out and form the identity of a team.

Bailey: I don’t think many wives were on that trip because it was three days, so it was just wanting to be around the guys — a sense of unity and a sense of family, because it was a very weird and unsettling situation. Let’s just be together and share a meal. It was just organic.

Joel Hanrahan (Red Sox reliever): Usually team dinners, there’s a couple guys that miss. Everybody was there. You could get a sense that nobody’s fucking with us this year. This is our time.

Ross: You saw the true colors of guys really fast because of the emotion that was in the room. We started talking about how to help. What could we do?

Middlebrooks: It seemed to be the topic of every conversation: What could we do to help? We knew the platform we had in a city like Boston. We knew people would watch and listen.

Cherington: As a player in that situation, you don’t have a choice as to whether to be the face of it. You don’t have a choice of whether to opt in to being a part of the public story around this. Inevitably, you just will be. So you have to figure out how you want to do that collectively, individually.

These guys, they’re not from here. They’re not from Boston. And they’re not given a choice as to whether to take on a public role with this or not; they just have to because of who they are. I remember being impressed with how they stepped up to handle that in an authentic way, in an appropriate and sensitive way.

Lovullo: We realized that we were part of the fabric of that town and now we were becoming a part of the fabric of that tragedy.

Ross: You never felt so a part of something so fast, me personally, of a new city coming in and trying to fit into a new team and trying to fit into the city and what it’s all about. We were thrown right into that with the bombing.

The Red Sox hung a jersey paying tribute to the victims in the Marathon attack when they took the field in Cleveland for the first series after the bombs went off. (Photo: Mark Duncan/AP)

With a road gray jersey sporting “BOSTON STRONG” around the city’s 617 area code hanging in their dugout, the Red Sox swept the Indians. They flew home after the finale, arriving a bit after midnight on what was developing into one of the wildest nights in the history of Boston.

Ross: As you think things are starting to get better, you get off the airplane as we land back in Boston, they were chasing the guys at that moment.

Gomes: I didn’t think whoever did the bomb was still fucking in town.

Identified by the police as the chief suspects in the bombing on Thursday afternoon, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had shot and killed MIT police officer Sean Collier, hijacked a car and engaged the police in a firefight in Watertown late that night. Anecdotally, half the city stayed up through the night, watching the non-stop special report on the local news.

Jack McCormick (Red Sox traveling secretary): We came back to Boston and made it to Fenway, the quickest trip we ever made from the airport because there was no traffic, no nothing. It was very eerie. Some guys didn’t even leave because they were watching it on television.

Gomes: I remember driving home, and it was late, but no one was on the road. I mean, no one. It was an eerie feeling. It just felt like the streetlights were dimmer.

Nava: All you heard were sirens all throughout Boston. It was almost a scene from a Batman movie: No one on the streets, and good fighting evil.

Orsillo: Even in snow lockdowns, there are other cars out there. Literally, we were the only ones that were not law enforcement on the road. For me, heading out of there to go home to Rhode Island, seeing all the police and law enforcement coming in from the other towns heading back out on 95 was just so weird.

Lovullo: I sat and watched everything that was going on until four or five in the morning.

By Friday morning, Governor Deval Patrick had asked the entire city of Boston to shelter in place. The city was, essentially, on lockdown.

Kennedy: [Mayor Thomas] Menino desperately wanted us to play, but the shelter-in-place was still in place. The fans can’t come to the game. Even players, we’re supposed to be on lockdown in our homes. We understood and he recognized that operationally, it just wasn’t going to be possible.

The game was postponed “to support the efforts of law enforcement officers.” With the lockdown still in effect, players from both teams ran into a problem.

Nava: We were starving, but we had no place to go get food. We knew based off the reports that the wisest thing to do was let the cops and the FBI handle what was going on. But at some point, you’ve got to eat.

The Royals, too, had nearly eaten the Westin Copley, which had also been serving as a staging ground for journalists that week, out of food. Many of the Red Sox lived in an apartment complex down the block from Fenway Park.

Four days after the Marathon bombing, Fenway Park was shuttered — instead of hosting a game against the Royals — as the city of Boston was under shelter in place orders while police conducted a manhunt for the perpetrators. (Photo: Kayana Szymczak/Getty Images)

Ross: There was a pizza place in the bottom. We couldn’t get food. So we ended up just ordering the pizza that was down there, maybe five or six pizzas. We couldn’t leave so we walked outside the apartment, opened the door next door and got the pizzas to go back…. Most of us met up for a late lunch, early dinner on the rooftop, just to get out of the apartment for a little bit. We just sat up there and talked a little bit, let the kids run around.

Bailey: We had just gotten together on the roof with our families, and the entire city looked like a painting from up there. It was a standstill. It was really eerie.

Hanrahan: The day they canceled the game was awful. I had to take my dog out, and it was just a ghost town. I saw one person that day, who literally walked five feet from me and we didn’t make eye contact. It was just eerie.

Ned Yost (Royals manager): The only people that were outside were policemen carrying their M15s or their assault rifles, everywhere. You didn’t see people.

Eric Hosmer (Royals first baseman): You could see the bomb-squad guys on the roofs.

Right around sundown, after the shelter-in-place had been lifted, police cornered and apprehended Dzhokhar Tzarnaev after he had been hiding in a backyard boat in Watertown. Tamerlan had been killed the night before. The Red Sox could move forward with Saturday afternoon’s game.

Lovullo: When I had heard that the criminals were captured, I actually went down to as close to the finish line as I could get and celebrated with the people. I considered myself a Bostonian and I was so proud to stand with them and unite with them.

Saturday morning, several Red Sox players toured Boston-area hospitals to meet with recovering victims and hospital staff. The team would continue to do that throughout the season.

Ross: You go into these rooms and their eyes just lit up and their mood lit up because they saw Boston Red Sox players. I felt such a responsibility from then on out — I think everybody did — that we were playing for more than just our organization. We were playing for those people in those beds, for those doctors and nurses and that city, trying to get them something positive to cling onto that year. I’ve never felt that kind of responsibility for something as I did that year.

By Saturday, Fenway Park had been swept for bombs three times in the last four days. It was actively patrolled by bomb-sniffing dogs all Saturday.

Cherington: I remember being a little nervous, honestly. We are in a public place. Fenway Park becomes a place where you have to start thinking about security. That was on the minds of some of our players.

Kennedy: Everyone was on edge. Even though they had caught him, you still are living with this sort of uncertainty of what’s going on around your city.

The game was preceded by a 25-minute ceremony that included survivors, first responders, marathon volunteers and law enforcement.

Middlebrooks: Watching the video tribute, you really didn’t know what to feel. I was sad because I hurt for the families, and then I would be overcome with anger because of the evil act of those kids.

Members of the law enforcement community were on hand to participate in the pre-game ceremonies to honor the Marathon bombing victims before the first game at Fenway Park after the attack. (Photo: Jim Rogash/Getty Images)

Gomes: Anytime anything’s on TV, it’s hard to put the real deal behind it, the backing to it. Cartoons are on TV. And then seeing all that, you’re talking CIA, you’re talking FBI, you’re talking SWAT, you’re talking the governor. And then that’s when it got real. And then seeing the people who were able to make it who had been injured, wow. I remember thinking this is a lifer. This is a lifetime moment. This is American history.

Nava: I was in tears. I had shades on, thank God.

Lovullo: Nobody could hold back their tears. It just came pouring out of everybody in different ways at different times. I know I was standing on the line for the national anthem in tears, and everybody else was, too.

Yost had been the third-base coach for the 2001 Atlanta Braves, the first visiting team to play in New York following Sept. 11.

Yost: Both of those games had the same sense and the same feeling of… of conquering a tough situation together. It was a celebration, and we felt it. You just felt the togetherness and strength of the city. I guess you can kind of call it one of the highlights of your career, being a part of that game.

The pregame ceremony culminated in a brief, improvised speech from David Ortiz. On the disabled list to start the season, Ortiz was in Boston instead of in Cleveland during that week — “staying in New England [that week] changed me,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Those four days told me a lot about where I lived, and just how deep my connection was to the city that adopted me.”

Asked to say a few words, Ortiz did not prepare a script.

Nava: There was nothing planned about that from our perspective. It wasn’t like, ‘We’re going to give David the mike.’ He got it and spoke from the heart and shared what a lot of people were thinking. And dropped an F-bomb.

Ross: David’s speech, I wanted to scream, ‘Fuck yeah!’ as loud as I possibly could.

Ortiz didn’t register that he had cursed in front of a sellout crowd. He briefly worried if he’d get in trouble for that — until he got a hard high five from Mayor Menino. “What I said became a rallying cry.”

David Ortiz’s remarks to the Fenway Park crowd before the first game there after the Marathon attacks became a rallying cry for the city. (Photo: Jim Rogash/Getty Images)

Mike Moustakas (Royals third baseman): I don’t even know the words to describe how I felt. It was an unbelievable feeling to watch him talk and watch the city rally around the Red Sox…. All I remember is being there and feeling how sports could heal in times of need.

Ross: You could tell he knew Boston probably better than anybody. He spoke from the heart and meant it.

There was the small matter of a game still to be played.

Middlebrooks: It felt like the biggest game of our lives. We knew we had to win, no matter what.

Ross: We had to win that game, right? We had to win that game. We could not lose.

The Red Sox trailed 2-1 in the bottom of the eighth. Gomes led off with a pinch-hit double, and Napoli walked with two outs. There were two on for Nava against Kelvin Herrera.

Gomes: We all had faith in each other with the clichés — keep battling and all that stuff. Sometimes you’ve got to be a realist: Daniel Nava’s probably not taking Herrera deep right here.

It was a 1-1 fastball that was supposed to hit the outside corner. It was middle-middle.

Nava: That’s probably my favorite one, just because of the nature of what it encapsulated — everything it meant for the town. I don’t ever want to be a part of that again as far as the tragedy that took place, but I’m grateful I was in that spot to help the team and the city.

Orsillo: When Daniel Nava hits the home run in the eighth, I remember really only being able to get out, ‘Boston, this is for you!’ After that, I couldn’t really speak.

Hosmer: When Nava hit the home run, it was pretty cool to be there for it. Obviously we were on the wrong end of it, but at that point in time baseball was not important.

Moustakas: To that city, it felt like Game 7 of the World Series. It was unbelievable to watch that team play the game that way. Obviously we wanted to win the game, but in that time, it was OK. This is a little bit more than just baseball.

Gomes: I don’t know what you want to believe in, but there was some extra help.

Middlebrooks: It was almost like we had a 10th player on the field with us that day.

Bailey: I’ve never felt a team so close to fans before. It was like the fans were part of our team all of a sudden.

Bailey allowed a home run to Lorenzo Cain in the ninth before striking out Alex Gordon with two runners on to earn the save.

Bailey: Running out of the bullpen, I’ve never felt that kind of total-body numbness.

Orsillo: I’ve done three no-hitters, two 500th home runs with Manny and David. To me, the most emotional game, the game that meant the most to me, was that Saturday game.

Pedroia: That win, it kind of felt like that the rest of the year. It was more than baseball. We were just trying to do everything we could for the people around here.

The Red Sox played that way the rest of the season. A year after finishing last in the American League East, they led nearly wire to wire, finishing with 97 wins. In October, after some more eighth-inning magic at Fenway in the ALCS, they won the World Series by defeating the Cardinals in six games. They clinched the championship at Fenway for the first time in 95 years.

Nava: It became an unsaid motivation for us to just keep going. We had a good team, but we had an attitude that it didn’t matter how far we were down. Two runs? Three runs? We didn’t care. We were going to come back and fight.

Bailey: That team recognized that we were an outlet at that point in time and just kept on winning. We just fed off that energy.

Napoli: It stuck with you all year — just the way the city came together, the way we came together to try to help people out as much as we possibly could.

Ross: I still to this day have not shaved my beard. It’s thinner, but I don’t know that I’ll ever take away that part of me, that beard as a part of me. That team, that year, the bombing and that city, I feel a responsibility to keep that. That’s a part of me.

The traditional duck boat parade route stopped by the Marathon finish line on Boylston Street. There, Gomes placed the World Series trophy and the original Boston Strong 617 jersey on the finish line. He told those who organized the parade that he wanted to turn a place of tragedy into one of triumph.

Gomes: For me to do that, in my head I was thinking of like world wars when they set that American flag, or the American flag on the fucking moon. It was so powerful, knowing that was going to be a forever moment.

Lovullo: As we’re on the duck boats through Boston on the parade route, there were millions of people on the streets for the same reason: We were celebrating a world championship but we were also remembering how we united in a special way.

Jonny Gomes brought the World Series trophy to the Marathon finish line on Boylston Street after the Red Sox won the title in 2013. (Photo: Jared Wickerham/Getty Images)

Five years later, the achievement of that season still stands out for that team.

Ross: Having that responsibility and actually coming through, I still feel a strong connection to the city because of that.

Nava: [Now], you start to realize that what we had was something that was really special. You don’t want to forget that.

Cherington: Among any other team I’ve ever been around — and I was around the ’04 and ’07 teams, too — that team played with a collective purpose I haven’t been around before or since…. It really felt like whatever the outcome was, they were going to do it themselves.

Ross returned to Boston this past week for the first time since his departure as a free agent in 2014.

Ross: I went down there to Boylston. I went out there and I could not get the images out of my head of the windows boarded up with wood and all the tennis shoes that were on the fence down there.

I could see it like it was yesterday.



With reporting from Rustin Dodd, Dennis Lin and Jen McCaffrey

(Top photo: Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images)