Following in his late father’s footsteps, Ozzy Trapilo has made his way from BC High to Boston College to, now, the National Football League.

Trapilo, selected in the second round (56th overall) by the Bears on Friday, can check off one more major box of his own. Steve Trapilo, drafted by the Saints in the fourth round in 1987, died of a heart attack at age 39 in 2004, when Ozzy was 2 years old.

“He set the bar pretty high, but for all the better,” Trapilo said. “I’m working as hard as I can to make him proud.”

Trapilo, a 6-foot-8-inch, 316-pound offensive tackle from Norwell, earned Atlantic Coast Conference first-team honors this past season. He started 36 games at right or left tackle during his BC career and boasted a team-best 80.5 pass-block rating from Pro Football Focus this year.

A cerebral and physical force who moves well for his size, he’s a difficult matchup for often-overpowered defensive linemen.

“You may think someone that big is not an athlete,” ESPN’s Booger McFarland said. “He plays light on his feet, heavy hands, position flexibility, able to move.”

Trapilo completed the 40-yard dash in 5.21 seconds, three-cone drill in 7.71 seconds, and 20-yard shuttle in 4.7 seconds at the NFL Scouting Combine.

He trained with former Patriots offensive line coach Dante Scarnecchia, alongside childhood friend and BC teammate Drew Kendall, in the months leading up to the Draft.

“His résumé doesn’t lie,” Trapilo said of Scarnecchia. “He’s a fantastic coach. Being able to work with him means a lot.”

BC head coach Bill O’Brien said Trapilo is someone who is the same every day, adding that he’ll be “a great pro.”

“He’ll do whatever you ask him to do,” O’Brien said. “He always puts the team first.”

Thanks to the science of cryogenics — portions of Williams’s body are reportedly frozen in an Arizona life-extension lab — there is always hope of a Second Coming. A real treat for the Fenway Faithful!

Hardly had we shaken off the dust from Opening Day than we were greeted by the inevitable, garment-rending remembrances of the 2013 Marathon bombing. I well remember the civic trauma, and my heart goes out to the survivors and the many injured.

Having said that, a bombing that claimed three fatalities in Gaza or Ukraine wouldn’t cause anyone to cancel a day at the beach. “Hundreds killed in Darfur in the past week alone,” said a Globe story.

You would think it’s time to move on. But we won’t. Boston is the city that is always looking back, never looking forward — “a winter city,” as the embittered ex-Bostonian Elizabeth Hardwick called it in a famous 1959 essay. Hardwick reviled Boston as a musty antiques barn that “attracted men of quiet and tasteful opinion, men interested in old families and things, in the charms of times recently past.”

Don’t get me wrong. I love Boston history. I think it’s grand that people dress up as redcoats and rebel militia to reenact the primal events of our successful Revolution. This is a great city, a cradle of America’s industrial revolution, once the headquarters of militant abolitionism, a town that once credibly claimed to be the “Athens of America.” Ho Chi Minh worked at the Parker House, Martin Luther King got his PhD here, Malcolm X got turned on to books here: What’s not to love?

It’s the mawkish sentimentality of manufactured nostalgia that rankles me.

To be fair, some progress has been made. We seem to have finally shucked off the Kennedys, and none too soon, as the thinning of the bloodline becomes all too apparent. For the first time in years, I’m not aware of some literary or movie project seeking to capitalize on the glory years of the Winter Hill Gang or Boston’s answer to Robin Hood, James “Whitey” Bulger.

And, after three solid years of stultifying Brady-Belichick-Kraft programming, my beloved sports talk radio seems to have finally moved on to more pressing concerns, e.g., how Mike Vrabel will mess up the NFL draft and how the Celtics will run the table in the National Basketball Association playoffs.

Good luck with that.

By way of self-torture, I have watched a few episodes of the HBO series “Celtics City,” a shot-through-gauze remembrance of Boston’s basketball glory days — Red, Russ, Couz, Larry — weren’t they marvelous, blah blah blah. Yes, I admit that the Reggie Lewis segment was tragically moving. Sportswriter Jackie MacMullan was choking up on screen, and I was tearing up in my living room.

In the first episode, the producers stuck a microphone in the face of a contemporary Causeway Street fanatic, who insisted that “Bill Russell is in the house, Johnny Most is in the house, Red Auerbach is in the house …”

His conclusion? “The ghosts are out, you can feel it.” Yes, I can feel it all too well.

Alex Beam’s column appears regularly in the Globe. Follow him @imalexbeamyrnot.

BOSTON — Kristaps Porzingis had a smile on his face even as the blood flowed as he entered the Celtics locker room. He got a hard elbow to the head from the Magic’s Goga Bitadze late in the third quarter, forcing him to leave the game.

But this time, his smile wasn’t to pump up the Celtics crowd or anything just as he had done a few weeks ago. Back then, in a UFC moment, as Porzingis left the court, he appealed to the crowd that he was just fine. This time, he was also still fine. But it was more exacerbation that he got hit in the head again that required five stitches. There was also no consideration on sitting out the rest of the Game 2 victory over the Magic to go up 2-0 in the series.

“Honestly, how can I not come (back)?” Porzingis said. “Like, ‘Oh, I have five stitches, I can’t play anymore.’ My legs work, everything works. So of course I’m going to be out there. And you know me. I like these moments. Coming back out again, getting a little love from the crowd. It just happens within the game and this is not going to stop me. So I’m going to keep going.”

Porzingis was more effective in Game 2, though he wouldn’t call his performance perfect by any means. He finished with 20 points and 10 rebounds, plus he was more assertive on some of his post-ups in the second half. Initially this series, the physicality bothered Porzingis as he struggled in the Game 1 win.

This time, Porzingis consistently got to the free throw line. So while he shot 5-for-14 from the floor, including 0-for-5 on 3-pointers, he was also 10-for-14 from the free throw line. He also contributed in other ways, pitching in two steals and a pair of early blocks that set the tone as he protected the rim.

The Celtics will need more of Porzingis at his best as the series and the playoffs continue. The C’s were without Jayson Tatum in Game 2 as he nurses a bone bruise in his right wrist. Tatum’s status going forward is unclear as he sat his first-ever playoff game since getting drafted by the Celtics. In the meantime, the rest of the Celtics will have to step up.

“We’re going to be us,” Porzingis said. “We’re not going to let anybody punk us. And we expect teams to be doing this kind of stuff, to get in our heads, to try to provoke us, to try to maybe get some reaction out of us. Some technical maybe, something. It’s an emotional game, obviously, so we weren’t surprised but we’re just not going to take it. So we’re going to hit them right back.”