Rarely has the Philadelphia sports fan base needed the emotional uplift of a “W” more than it did heading into the Saturday-to-Saturday stretch with Jaron “Boots” Ennis and Danny “Swift” Garcia headlining boxing’s biggest cards of last weekend and this one.

Sorry in advance for boring you with these details if you’re a boxing fan who cares not a lick about Philly team sports, but I am a perpetually spiraling (even in happy times) Philly sports fan, so you will indulge my cathartic grumbling for just a few paragraphs:

The Phillies suffered three playoff losses in those six days, each game eminently winnable, with the one that ended their season coming on a bizarre moment of pure panic by a young pitcher in extra innings.

The Eagles slipped from 4-0 to 4-2 by first blowing a 17-3 lead at home and then losing as a double-digit favorite to a division rival, going from Super Bowl contender to (for now) broken team in less than a week.

The Flyers, who play at the same Xfinity Mobile Arena in South Philly that hosted the Ennis fight this past Saturday, started their season off with a loss – the first of many, to be sure.

And while there isn’t a major college football program in Philadelphia, Penn State is the adopted local-ish team, and the Nittany Lions’ season has suddenly turned full-on apocalyptic (consecutive losses to unranked teams, quarterback’s college career over due to injury, head coach fired).

Sunday morning, a podcast hit my feed with the title “The Sixers Are Philadelphia’s Only Hope,” which speaks volumes if you know anything about the sheer torture of rooting for the 76ers over the past dozen years or so.

I am well aware that for the great majority of Philly sports fans, a win for a hometown boxer salves no wounds. For most people, it doesn’t count as stemming the tide for the city any more than Philly-area racehorse Smarty Jones would have counted as ending the town’s title drought when he nearly won the Triple Crown in 2004. (Believe it or not, this was an actual Philly sports radio debate at the time.)

But Philly has history as a fight town – much more than as a horse racing town.

There is at least some overlap between Eagles/Phillies/Sixers/Flyers fans and boxing fans.

And to those in that section of the Venn diagram, the Sixers are not Philadelphia’s only hope.

Because we have Boots Ennis.

Philly fans needed a W, any W, last weekend. And boy did Boots give ’em one.

It took Ennis just one minute and 58 seconds to dispose of Portugal-based southpaw Uisma Lima in Ennis’ first scheduled 12-rounder at 154lbs. Boots was positively destructive.

His first serious punch, a right uppercut from the southpaw stance just over a minute into the fight, hurt Lima. A spectacular right hook-left cross-right hook combination produced a knockdown. The next salvo produced a second knockdown – just as referee Shawn Clark was readying to call off the fight. And the next attack after that pinned Lima defenseless in the corner, leading Clark to wave it off a half-second before a white towel fluttered into the ring.

This was the sort of performance Ennis used to produce routinely. Of his first 30 pro bouts, 16 ended in the first or second round.

After those first 30, however, came a run of five straight fights that went five rounds or more – not that the performances were necessarily subpar, though it’s fair to say the two distance wins over Karen Chukhadzhian were. In any case, the Lima fight was a return to form for Ennis, the sort of electrifying display of offensive talent that once had him tabbed as a future pound-for-pound king.

Did he excel in this manner because he’s better and stronger with seven extra pounds on his frame and free from any struggles to make weight? Or did Lima just not belong in the same zip code as him?

It’s too soon to say about the first question. But clearly the answer to the second question is yes. This was not a remotely competitive piece of matchmaking.

And so here we are again with Ennis. He got the win the rest of Philadelphia’s athletes couldn’t locate last week, and looked magnificent doing so, but those two minutes of thrills are over, and now we once again turn our attention to the unsatisfying resume, the unconquered portions of the landscape and the ticking clock.

And we turn our attention to the 37-year-old Garcia, whose boxing clock is down to possibly its final ticks but who has left nobody wondering what woulda, coulda or shoulda been.

Garcia is in the main event this Saturday at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, atop a card he’s promoting, against one Daniel “El Gallo” Gonzalez of Queens, New York, who, like Lima, is not being brought in to win.

Garcia was the best Philly fighter of the era just prior to Ennis’, though he only fought in his hometown four times, and never at an arena as large as Xfinity Mobile, site of three of Ennis’ last four fights. Barclays effectively became Garcia’s home arena — this will be his 10th fight there. The event is being called “Farewell to Brooklyn,” and Garcia is loosely framing it as the last fight of his career, even if he won’t fully commit to it being so.

This past Friday, following the Ennis-Lima weigh-in, Garcia appeared along with current lightweight titlist Shakur Stevenson as a guest on Chris Mannix and Sergio Mora’s podcast in front of a live audience at the 2300 Arena in Philly, and Stevenson played the role of host for a moment, asking Garcia a question: What’s more important to him as a prizefighter, legacy or money?

“Me, legacy,” Garcia said. “Because, I feel like the legacy brings the money. That’s why I always fought the best, not because of the money. … I feel like if the legacy’s there, the money’s always going to be there because of your resume. Your resume is what gets you the big bucks.”

He continued moments later: “You’re better off fighting the best, because on an off night you can lose to a bum. And that makes you look bad. … I’m glad I lost to the best.”

It was impossible to miss the contrast between the career thus far of Ennis (undefeated but, at age 28, still not properly tested) and that of Garcia (with 14 fellow titleholders faced and four losses suffered along the way).

Garcia stepped up with great success early on, beating, among others, Erik Morales, Amir Khan and Lucas Matthysse at junior welterweight.

As he hit his late 20s and was competing as a welterweight, most of his biggest clashes ended in defeat – all by close decision, against Keith Thurman, Shawn Porter and Errol Spence.

Last September, he was stopped for the first time, in a middleweight fight against Erislandy Lara. Garcia was never really in the fight. He looked equal parts too old and too small. It appeared it might be the final fight of an outstanding career. But it apparently wasn’t the note Garcia wanted to finish on.

Garcia has been talking a fair bit recently about his Hall of Fame worthiness, but that’s a debate that can wait at least three years. There’s no debating, though, that he was willing to face everyone, that he took all the fights necessary to build a Hall of Fame resume, even if he didn’t win all of those fights.

That hasn’t been the case thus far for Ennis, whose best win came against Eimantis Stanionis, and from there it drops to the likes of Roiman Villa and Sergey Lipinets.

Matthysse, Khan and Morales they are not.

After Ennis dispatched Lima, though, he talked the talk as well as one could hope regarding who’s next. A showdown with Vergil Ortiz – the other best young American junior middleweight contender, the man Ennis was widely accused of avoiding mere months ago – is now the fight he says he wants and is promising fans they’ll get.

“It’s going to happen next,” Ennis assured everyone in the ring after getting past Lima. Boots acknowledged, however, that Ortiz first has a fight planned in November against Erickson Lubin, which led to a few “if not” call-outs, including Jermell Charlo, Sebastian Fundora, Bakhram Murtazaliev and Xander Zayas.

Ennis-Ortiz is the fight everybody wants. But any of those other names would also qualify as a meaningful, dangerous step up for Ennis.

If Boots was prepared to go down the Danny Garcia road, he’d spend the next few years fighting every last one of them.

On that podcast with Mannix and Mora, Garcia spoke a bit about what being a Philly fighter has meant for him.

“I tell people this: If Danny wasn’t from Philly, you probably [would have] never heard of me,” he said. “Because the Puerto Rican and the Philly style boxing is what made me who I am. The mentality, just the way that people are, people are so tough out here, and they’re just so gritty, and it pushed me to be a great fighter.”

Not all of the athletes representing his hometown have been gritty or great the last several days.

But Boots Ennis certainly was as he snapped Philly’s losing streak. And Garcia has a chance to receive that baton this coming weekend.

The most iconic Philadelphia sports moment this century saw a backup tight end throw a touchdown to a quarterback. So maybe the present and future of Philadelphia boxing handing off to the recent past of Philadelphia boxing isn’t so unusual.

Especially because we know that after he’s done at Barclays Center, Garcia will toss that baton right back to Ennis.

And then it will be up to Ennis to decide if he wants to be not just Philly’s next great talent, but Philly’s next great fighter.

Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with nearly 30 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s The Moneymaker Effect. He can be reached on X, BlueSky, or LinkedIn, or via email at RaskinBoxing@yahoo.com.