This legacy is primarily one of pain, as the memories of individual tragedies from that day - and succeeding days - stir once more. But it also involves, enduringly, positive memories of how those at the scene, and others across the city, responded.

Recalling and celebrating the resilience and resourcefulness of those faced with horror is one of the most primal of human instincts. It is an essential element of drama - so it is not surprising that the Boston Marathon bombings should be the subject of upcoming feature films as well as a play, entitled Finish Line, which had its opening night on Thursday of last week (April 7) and will run preview performances until April 23 at the city’s NonProfit Center ahead of its world premiere opening next April.

This Boston Theater Company production draws from interviews with 88 people involved in the traumatic events of that day, including numerous runners who survived injury. The 10 actors involved use verbatim transcripts to convey a multiple viewpoint on the bombing and its aftermath.

As such, Finish Line (The Untold Stories of the 2013 Boston Marathon) takes its place within a tradition of films, dramas and books based on sporting events that have been scarred by human disaster.

In the meantime, filming has begun in Boston on to more projects based on that fateful day in 2013 – Patriots’ Day, and Stronger.

Patriots’ Day is a joint CBS and Lionsgate project about the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing starring Oscar winner J K Simmons, Mark Wahlberg and Michelle Monaghan.

Simmons will play Sergeant Jeffrey Pugliese of the Watertown Police Department, who distinguished himself in the firefight which ended with the arrest of one of the brothers who had planted the bombs, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, while Wahlberg is a composite Boston Police Department officer who has a key part in the investigation and manhunt. Monaghan plays his wife.

The film, which recreates the bombings and the pursuit of those responsible, is due to open in Los Angeles, Boston and New York on December 21 before a world launch on January 13 next year.

Stronger, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, is based on the autobiography of the same name written by Jeff Bauman, who lost both legs in the Boston bombing while waiting at the finish line for his girlfriend, and went on to become one of the main witnesses at the trial of the surviving younger brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

On Tuesday last week (April 5) fans of the Boston Bruins ice hockey team stayed behind following their match against the Carolina Hurricanes to take part in a recreation of the inspirational occurrence that took place less than three weeks after the bombing when Bauman, in a wheelchair, acted as the Bruins’ banner captain, waving their flag before their second play-off game against Toronto Maple Leafs.

After playing his part as Bauman, Gyllenhaal thanked all the fans who had stayed behind to take part in the filming – the results of which are due to be on general release next year.

In terms of its subject matter and approach, Stronger appears to inhabit the middle ground between Patriots’ Day and Finish Line.

The latter’s opening performance took place just a day after the jury on the most recent inquests into the 96 football followers who lost their lives at Hillsborough in 1989 retired to consider its verdict after a process that had begun in March 2014.

Whether these proceedings will figure in any future production remains to be seen. But there has already been a major TV drama aired on the subject of the disaster that occurred at the Liverpool v Nottingham Forest FA Cup semi-final, the 27th anniversary of which falls this Friday (April 15).

Entitled Hillsborough, the 1996 drama was written by Liverpudlian Jimmy McGovern, best known for his earlier TV series Cracker. It follows three families from Liverpool involved in the tragedy, starting from before the match and continuing through ensuing court battles to decide responsibility for the fatal sequence of events. The cast includes Ricky Tomlinson and Christopher Eccleston, with the latter playing Trevor Hicks, whose daughters Sarah and Victoria died in the crush of bodies on the Leppings Lane terracing.

McGovern said he had been inspired to set about the project by the passionate response from many of the grieving Hillsborough families to a 1994 episode of Cracker in which the character of Albie rages against stories printed in The Sun newspaper about Liverpool fans stealing from the dead and urinating on them.

Eighteen years before the Hillsborough disaster, 66 football followers died at Ibrox Stadium as safety barriers on an exit staircase buckled during a crush following an Old Firm match between Rangers and Celtic.

To mark the 40th anniversary of the Ibrox Disaster, a documentary film was released entitled Stairway 13 which featured testimony from some of those who survived the desperate scenes at the exit to the ground, and from Rangers players John Greig and Sandy Jardine, who were two of the most prominent attendees at the subsequent funerals.

On May 11, 1985, another horrendous loss of life occurred at a British football ground when 56 supporters died in a fire at Bradford City’s Valley Parade ground after a blaze thought to have been started by a cigarette being discarded onto rubbish and litter which had collected below the wooden main stand.

In 2014 the theatre company Funny You Should Ask premiered a tribute to the 56 people who died at the fire. Called The 56, the play dramatises actual accounts of the Bradford City Fire with the purpose of showing how, in times of adversity, the Football Club and the local community came together. Profits from the play's run at The Edinburgh Fringe were donated to the Bradford Burns Unit.

Although this was clearly on a smaller scale than the play currently running in Boston, its basic dynamic was much the same.

The co-creators of Finish Line, Joey Frangieh and Lisa Rafferty, have said they wanted to produce a drama that dwelt not on the horror of April 15, 2013, but on way those affected by it confronted and overcame the grim circumstances.

“We don’t focus on the terrorists,” says Frangieh. “We don’t focus on the bombing. I don’t care to know about them. I certainly don’t want to promote them.”

The show ends with the 2014 Boston Marathon, for which many of the injured runners return. Among those was Lee Ann Yanni, a physical therapist who was at the race to cheer on two of her patients.

She suffered a fractured fibula, tendon and nerve damage following the first bomb blast, which also left shrapnel in her left leg.

Yanni nevertheless maintained that she would be sticking to her plan of running the Chicago Marathon six months later, which she did, following up a further six months on by running the 2014 Boston race. “There wasn’t anything that was going to stop me,” she said.

It is a sentiment which Frangieh fully embraces. “You can hurt us, but you can’t hurt our spirit. You can’t stop us from doing what we want to do,” he added.

Characters whose audio recordings will be re-voiced by actors include Army Master Sgt. Bernard "Chris" Spielhagen II, an Iraq War veteran who had just finished the race when the first bomb went off and who worked with two National Guardsmen to break a wooden bench and make a stretcher for a woman with severe leg injuries.

Spielhagen wrapped her leg with a volunteer's jacket, made a splint and stayed with her until an ambulance came.

Harry McEnerny, a triage technician in the emergency room at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, recalled how he had had an impulse to run away after hearing rumours that another hospital in Boston had been bombed – but he stayed helping patients for hour upon hour.

McEnerny was unharmed, but confessed to having been troubled by guilt over his “weakness.”

Similar concerns nagged at the parents of marathon finisher Brad Jensen, whose mother accompanied him over the last six miles for support. After the blasts, the pair were found by Jensen’s father and the family group walked away together unhurt. But Jensen talks about how his parents subsequently struggled with feelings of guilt for not staying and helping the injured, and relates how he told them they were simply following the primal instinct of protecting their child.

Among the other bombing survivors whose tales are told is Richard Webster, who crossed the finish line minutes before the first of the two blasts.

“It’s going to be very interesting and emotional,” he told CBS. “I will never forget how loud the blast was.

 “To relive it, every time it comes around again, either through recounting it or hearing somebody talk about it, it brings back all of those very raw feelings.”

This gets to the heart of the discussion which any such drama will provoke. Working with the “raw feelings” provoked by human suffering and pain is clearly a major part of any film or play on the subject of disasters, whether in a sporting context or not.

No one can doubt the power of these feelings to attract the attention of viewers. But are the emotions raised for the valid reason of providing a sense of healing, of catharsis, for those involved – or are they there for the wider emotional gratification of those not involved?

The question has been asked by numerous observers and commentators about the wide variety of books, films, TV programmes and dramas produced in the wake of the 9-11 bombings in New York.

In an article published in the Melbourne Age on May 3, 2003, Suzy Freeman-Greene reviewed recent editions of TV police dramas such as Law and Order and NYPD Blue which had featured storylines either explicitly about the Twin Towers, or alluding clearly to the devastation of the World Trade Center.

“Watching these police dramas, it’s hard to know how to read their storylines,” Freeman-Greene wrote. “Are they a crude but vital contribution to a collective healing? Or an opportunistic take on so many individual tragedies?”

By September 2014, according to www.imdb.com, there were 38 films in circulation on the broad subject of 9-11, when two airliners brought down the twin towers of the World Trade Center, killing almost 3,000 people in the process. Some are documentaries. Some take the form of mini-series. Within a year of the attacks, 11’09”01 – September 11, a collection of short films made by directors ranging from Ken Loach to Sean Penn, had been released, as had The Guys – “the story of a fire captain who lost eight men in the collapse of the World Trade Center and the editor who helps him prepare the eulogies he must deliver” - starring Sigourney Weaver and Anthony LaPaglia.

While some may question whether dramatic reinterpretations of such traumatic events as the Boston Bombings serve to prolong and exacerbate the pain of those who suffered in the attacks, most would surely concur with the view that Finish Line, based as it is on direct testimony of those who endured the brutal events of that April day in a variety of different forms, will have a predominantly healing and binding effect.

As Frangieh described the effort to the Associated Press: "It's about the runners, it's about the spectators, it's about a city, a state, a country that chose to not allow an act of evil, an act of violence to define who we are."