Patriots deliver masks to Massachusetts and New York amidst crisis

New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft used his private plane — and his own money — to deliver protective masks to both Massachusetts and New York.

It’s rare to see a feel-good story when it comes to the relationship between New York and Boston.

Though both cities share a common time zone and geographic proximity to one another, historically there’s been no love lost between them or their inhabitants — and that’s mainly due to sports. New York and Boston have a rivalry in the sports scene unshared and unequaled by any other upper East Coast cities (ie. Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington D.C., etc.).

Yankees/Red Sox and Jets/Patriots are probably the fiercest and most bitter rivalries for the two cities, but Rangers/Bruins and Knicks/Celtics also have featured some nasty and acrimonious moments over the years, too.

Yet all it takes is a national (or international) crisis for groups of people to set aside their differences and come together in the name of the greater good.

And that’s precisely what happened at the end of last week when the New England Patriots‘ team plane ferried 1.2 million N95 masks straight from Shenzhen, China, back to Logan International Airport in Boston, Massachusetts, per Bleacher Report’s Mike Chiari.

While those masks were then sent to a stockpile in the custody of the National Guard with the intention of being distributed as needed throughout the state of Massachusetts, Kraft himself reached out “across the aisle” to New Yorkers by purchasing at least 300,000 masks for the makeshift hospital in the converted Javits Center.

Kraft paid for those masks himself and ensured they made their way safely to New York City.

The New York Post, one of the most famous and overtly critical NYC media operations when it comes to New England sports and the Patriots in particular, ran a front page ad over the weekend with the headline: “Something we thought we’d never say … thank you, Pats.”

Per CNN, as of Sunday morning, the US as a country had at least 321,000 cases of the novel coronavirus, and at least 9,100 people have died already from the virus or from complications caused by it.

New York state — and the Big Apple, in particular — has been hit the hardest so far by the pandemic. Over a third of the total national cases have occurred in the Empire State, as well as over half of the total deaths.