Kenzo Tribouillard/Agence France-Presse â Getty Images  French soccer players celebrated in November with their coach, Didier Deschamps, rear, after they had qualified for the 2014 World Cup with an improbable comeback in the playoff against Ukraine.  Bad news knows no borders in the age of Wi-Fi.  My family and I were nearly half a world away from our Boston home when the bombers struck the Boston Marathon on April 15, but we were soon informed gently of the tragedy by the proprietors of our guest house in the Sri Lankan hill town of Ella.  It seemed quite a role reversal for Sri Lankans to be offering condolences to foreigners in a country once devastated by civil war and the 2004 tsunami. But in that enduring, lovely place of undulating green, the news was delivered with more tenderness than dread, more hopefulness than resignation.  At yearâs end, that resilient tone sounds just right. Boston and the sports world have absorbed the latest attack on the right to play in peace and have since moved on with energy and optimism.  Nicole Gross, an American triathlete whose legs were badly injured in that attack, which killed three and wounded more than 100, returned to the pool in October and returned to a race course last month to watch the Thunder Road Marathon in Charlotte, North Carolina, with her sister and husband, who were also injured in Boston.  âWeâre here to tell the world that weâre not scared to be at a finish line again,â Gross told the runners in that race. âWe will embrace the finish line one more time.â  That spirit also infused the Boston Red Sox, one of the symbols of the city, who regrouped quite literally after an abysmal 2012 season and rode their new lineup and underdog attitude all the way to victory in major league baseballâs World Series in October.  Title in hand and scraggly playoff beards still in place, the team paraded through the streets of Boston, with the players Jarrod Saltalamacchia and Jonny Gomes placing the World Series trophy on the marathon finish line.  It was a year of bounce-backs, and although Lance Armstrong, who was finally and definitively unmasked as a cheater, has done no favors to comebacks, the athletes of the world seemed to pick up the pace when it came to staring down deficits that should have been decisive and shaking off rust that should have been restrictive.  LeBron James and the Miami Heat were down by 5 points in the sixth game of the National Basketball Association Finals in June with less than 30 seconds left in regulation and still found a way to grab enough offensive rebounds and sink enough 3-pointers to beat the San Antonio Spurs and force a seventh game â which the Heat would win to secure their second straight title.  Across the Atlantic, Franck RibÃ©ry and the French national soccer team were down and very likely out of next yearâs World Cup finals after losing the opening leg of their playoff against Ukraine, 2-0, in Kiev. But then Les Bleus roared back to win at home, 3-0, book their against-the-odds spot in Brazil and give their downbeat country a big lift.  In the Champions League, Borussia Dortmund, on the brink of elimination in the quarterfinals, got goals in added time from Marco Reus and Felipe Santana to somehow defeat Malaga, 3-2, and eventually advanced to the final in May, when Bayern Munich was good enough to be immune to comebacks.  But others were not. In the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs in May, the Boston Bruins were down, 4-1, with 11 minutes left in the decisive Game 7 in Boston. No team in National Hockey League history had won a Game 7 from three goals down in the final period. The Bruins soon became the first.  âAnything can happen, and thatâs exactly what happened,â said Milan Lucic of the Bruins.  So it seemed fitting when six weeks later, in the same arena, the Chicago Blackhawks pulled their goalkeeper and scored twice in the final 76 seconds to snatch victory and the trophy from those same Bruins.  âAll of a sudden, it felt like you had so much weight on your back,â said the Boston forward David Krejci. âYou couldnât move, couldnât think, and just couldnât get it done.â  Some of the same mysterious forces appeared to be at work last month in Auburn, Alabama. With the two American college football powerhouses Alabama and Auburn tied, 28-28, the Alabama kicker Adam Griffith lined up for what would have been a long, game-winning 57-yard field goal.
Plenty of buoyant news traveled far and wide around the globe, as a resilient never-say-die tone carried the day in an array of sports.