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David Ortiz won Boston.com’s bracket of the best sports soundbites, and it wasn’t close

This is our f****** bracket winner.

David Ortiz put the city of Boston on his back and made the remark heard ‘round the world to the Fenway Park crowd at the emotional memorial service for Boston Marathon bombing victims when the Red Sox returned to the playing field on Apr. 20. Jim Rogash/Getty Images

By Hayden Bird

March 25, 2026 | 1:30 PM

1 minute to read

As he did so many times during his legendary Boston career, David Ortiz faced a capable field of competitors and emerged victorious.

After 10 days, more than 10,000 votes cast, and scores of spirited water-cooler debates raging up and down the Eastern Seaboard (or at least the New England portion of it), readers have settled on a champion to our 2026 March Madness-themed bracket question: What is the best soundbite in Boston sports history?

The winner, by a somewhat staggering margin, is David Ortiz reassuring the 2013 Fenway Park crowd that, “This is our f****** city.”

The soundbite in its entirety encapsulates so much of the greatness of Boston sports — emotional resonance, ability to deliver the unexpected, and promoting a spirit of inextricable community — that it’s hardly surprising Ortiz’s speech won.

As Boston.com columnist Chad Finn correctly identified in his recent piece looking back at the 2013 moment, “David Ortiz came through, not only when the Red Sox needed him most, but when Boston did. Every other quote in this bracket is playing for second.”

Results essentially confirmed this declaration. Not only did the Ortiz entry garner the single greatest number of votes for any individual round (totaling 2,796 in the first round), but it also won by the single greatest margin of victory over another entry (doing so against Larry Lucchino’s still-iconic “Evil Empire” quote in the second round).

Yet for all of Ortiz’s ultimately clear-cut path to the winner’s circle, the 2026 Boston.com bracket delivered some unprecedented upsets. Kevin Millar’s “Don’t let us win today” emerged from 11th-seeded obscurity to make a run all the way to the championship round.

Poignantly (given the quote and context), Millar staged an improbable series of upsets, toppling higher-seeds like Kevin Garnett’s “Anything is possible” and Rick Pitino’s inimitable “Larry Bird’s not walking through that door.”

It’s the first time that neither of the top two seeds in site’s annual bracket failed to reach the final. In 2026, Boston.com readers voted for more chaos, but still made an iconic choice in the end to once again cement Ortiz as a winner.