"Down by the river, down by the banks of the river Charles . . ."

I wasn't born and raised in Boston, but as a college kid, I lived there. This was so long ago that the Faneuil Hall Marketplace didn't even exist yet. The now-defunct Combat Zone, a seedy “adult entertainment district,” was in its prime in those days. And the Curse of the Bambino still held the Red Sox in its deadly grip.

Much has changed in The Hub since I graduated 41 years ago, but few things have transformed my beloved city more than the horrific and cowardly Patriots Day attack that occurred at the finish line of the Boston Marathon on Monday.

Like any big city, Boston had its share of crime in my time there. After all, the last of the Boston Strangler’s victims was not found until 1964, four years before I moved to Boston as a college freshman. Whenever I got off the bus on a Sunday night after returning from a visit with my family, I’d keep a wary eye as I lugged a suitcase to my apartment. In 1974, only two years after my graduation, a long period of racial tension and sporadic violence began, as protests mounted over the forced integration of Boston’s public schools.

Yet the type of mayhem that occurred in Boston on Patriots Day was incomprehensible when I lived there. Criminals could be elusive and faceless, and racial tension seethed beneath the surface, but the use of terrorism to kill and maim large groups of people was unheard of in those days, in Boston or anywhere else in America.

That changed over time. Nowadays, the idea that innocent people may place themselves in harms way simply by congregating in a public place or a confined space is nothing new. In 1995, the Oklahoma City bombing killed 168 people and injured more than 680 others. The Centennial Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta, the 9/11 attacks, and assorted mass shootings all followed in due course. The repeated, wholesale slaughter of innocents has become all too familiar.

But I’ve never lived in Oklahoma City or Atlanta or New York or Columbine or Aurora or Newtown. I may park my hat 150 miles north of Boston these days, but it's still my city, and now the sickening lunacy that is terrorism has reared its head on a street that I've walked countless times, only a few blocks from where I once lived. This week, The Atlantic ran this headline on an essay by Andrew Cohen about the continued role Boston plays in the lives of the people who were educated there: "You May Leave Boston, but Boston Never Leaves You."

If I know anything about Boston, it's that this proud, beautiful city is the very embodiment of resilience. Those of us who left a piece of our hearts there when we grabbed our diplomas and moved on are grieving, but we know our city will bounce back. Stronger. Tougher. More vigorous.

As President Obama said during his visit to Boston yesterday: "When the Sox and Celtics and Patriots or Bruins are champions again — to the chagrin of New York and Chicago fans — the crowds will gather and watch a parade go down Boylston Street. And this time next year, on the third Monday in April, the world will return to this great American city to run harder than ever, and to cheer even louder, for the 118th Boston Marathon. Bet on it."