Right now, in terms of sports, Boston is a baseball city that loves football, likes basketball, and used to watch some sport on ice whose name I can’t remember.

But once a year a fifth sport pushes all of those into the background. Indeed, it’s the only day between the first pitch at Fenway through the last pitch of the season—usually at Yankee Stadium, until last year—that the Red Sox ever play second fiddle to another sporting event in Boston.

It happens on the third Monday in April, and the event is the Boston Marathon.

This year welcomed the 110th running of the country’s oldest road race. With three SuperBowl championship rallys and a Red Sox World Championship Parade in the past four years, perhaps there is no city more trained in how to line the streets to cheer for their Champions.

For those events, they got the practice needed from the annual Marathon. And the cheers are no less audible for the Marathoners as they cruise past the police barricades. Maybe we don’t know their names—or just can’t pronounce them—but Boston loves its champions, and Bostonians know the brave souls who punish their bodies for during this grueling event—thousands of whom have no hope of a prize—deserve the same hero worship accorded to the Schillings and Bradys of this world.

Every year 20,000 people descend on the small town of Hopkinton, Mass., to begin the 26.2 mile sojourn through the Boston suburbs, struggling up Heartbreak Hill, feeling the fires (in their legs) of Hell’s Alley, basking in the glow of the coeds at Wellsey—who solicit kisses from the runners, which reminds me I need to start training—until finally crossing the blue stripe marking the Finish Line in front of another Boston institution, the Public Library, on Boylston Street.

And every year, some 500,000 spectators turn out to cheer for these super-humans, and we think to ourselves, “I can do that… I’m going to start training for next year.” And then we empty our red plastic cup of its beer, polish off the end of our fourth hot dog, and think to ourselves… “Yeah… Next year.”

It’s such a Boston institution, that it’s an official public holiday in the Commonwealth. Its real name is Patriot’s Day, not for the football team, but for the real heroes, the men and women who provide the blanket of security that make our freedom possible. But, with as much respect to them as one person can give, I have to say the better name for it is what the local sports anchors call it: Marathon Monday.

There’s a Red Sox game, sure, but with the exception of the 35,000 at Fenway, there aren’t a lot of people watching. You'll never be asked, "What's the score" so many times in your life. The Marathon takes center stage this day. (That, and the pre-marathon “warm up” parties.) But the city celebrates in grand style, even launching two F-16 fighters to signal the start of the race. They head from Hopkinton to Fenway, and you’ve never heard a crowd cheer so loud as when they go screaming overhead… because that’s the coolest way imaginable to tell 35,000 people that the day’s signature event has started.

Why the glory? Perhaps because the Marathon is also one of the few sporting events where average Joes and Janes can compete on the same course as the sports’ greats. The 26.2 mile course is no different if you’re an unprecedented 4-time champion like Catherine Ndereba of Kenya, longtime staple and two-time winner Johnny Kelly (who passed away last year), or a regular guy like Nicholas Giordano of Malden, Mass, who proposed to his girlfriend Debbie Arduino of Plainville, Mass, after they crossed the finish line.

As I watch these people run, I can’t help but be amazed at their stupidity bravery. I wonder if they know the history of the Marathon—and why we even call it that. And I think that if they did, they’d be a lot less likely to compete in it.

It started with a man named Pheidippides (and you thought Catherine Ndereba has it rough). A soldier in the Greek Army in 490 B.C., he was anointed with the task of bringing word to the capital of Athens that the Greeks had defeated their rivals, the Persians, in the town of—you guessed it—Marathon. Pheidippides took off at a sprint, likely wearing no shoes... because back then, Nike was a God and not something you stuck your smelly foot in.

A little over 26 miles later, he reached the gates of Athens. Pheidippides sucked in what little wind he could muster and pronounced a single word: Nikki.

Victory.

And then he died. Dropped dead. Like a sack of fatty potatoes.

So every time I watch these Catherines and Johnnys and Joes and Janes, I can’t help but wonder if they know that story. If they don’t, I think that maybe ignorance is bliss. But if they do, I think that they’re even more deserving of my praise, and that’s why I’m happy to line the barricades and cheer them on, doing my part to celebrate their personal niki, clapping as loud as I can.

As soon as I finish this hot dog.