We Believe

I am so full of joy right now, it makes no sense.

I'm not a Red Sox fan. I grew up in NWOhio, which meant I had one of two choices: the Tigers or the Indians. Being that my dad was a Cleveland fan, and that my thought process was loyalty to state rather than geographic proximity, my devotion went to the Tribe. And they have remained there, through good times and bad, my whole life. No other team has ever threatened to take that away.

So why, then, does the Sox's most impossible of impossible comebacks cheer me so? Why does this team, which I have never been a big fan of, beating the Yankees and becoming ALCS champions, staging the single most incredible comeback in baseball history in the process, make me so glad to be alive?

Is it Yankee hatred? No, not really. As much as I razz Heather for her devotion to all things Yankee, I don't really hate the club. I find their fans in general to be a little annoying, but I think that may be a sheer spite issue on my part - because they always seem to take such glee in crushing everyone else's dreams. So yeah, there's a little schadenfreude (pardon if my German is off, but there's no English word to cover it) in my glee at seeing the Yanks go down.

Is it admiration for the Red Sox as an organization? Yeah, in part. They have always been a very important baseball franchise - one of the cornerstones of the league. However many years without a title, the Sox are an anchor for the entirety of baseball - it's as impossible to imagine the game without Sox as it is to imagine it without, well, Yankees.

Is it the glee of seeing the whole silliness about "the Curse of the Bambino" finally, hopefully, get shelved? Yeah, a lot of it is that. Now, granted, if the Sox don't win the World Series, we'll probably keep hearing about the stupid curse stuff for another however-many-years. But being down 3 games to none and becoming the only team in the history of the sport to come back and win the series, and winning it IN Yankee stadium, no less? In my book, that's a pretty effective exorcism if there ever was one.

No, I think the reason the Sox winning means so much is simple: it was, dramatically, perfect.

Did you know that Stephen King is co-writing a book about this year's Sox? He started at the beginning of the year and has been following them ever since. If King had somehow had carte blanche to write the script of this season himself, even HE couldn't have come up with the climax we got tonight. No one would have bought the book - the plot is just too absurd. It was, almost literally, impossible for what happened to have happened. But it did.

When the Yanks won 19-8 on Saturday, everyone, myself included, took it as a given that it was over. Yanks in the Series, again. Sox fans heartbroken, again. Another year added to the decades of anxious waiting and misery, with names like Dent and Mookie popping up painfully in the memory like the eyes in the soup in Temple of Doom. As a fan who has waited his whole life to see the Indians win a Series, I knew the pain. The Marlins loss still stings, a lot.

But then, game 4, I started noticing these signs all over the place in Fenway: "We Believe." At the time, it seemed a rather quaint gesture, the fans saying that even though all logic said they were going down, they still were there. And then, the improbable win in extra innings in Game 4. Then again, in Game 5. All the way, the naysayers (me included) treating these wins like prolonging of the inevitable. They're sending Schilling to the mound in game 6? The guy whose sock is soaked in blood? They got no one left, they're screwed. Except Schilling was brilliant, and they took Game 6. And then, tonight.

"We Believe," indeed. At some level, we all want to believe like that. We want to believe that the underdog can come back against incredible odds and win the whole thing. We want to believe that, but in real life, that ain't the way it works. The underdog gets stomped more often than not. Dreams fade. Reality hits us like a punch to the gut. And belief just ain't enough.

Usually.

But when it comes through, and the dream comes in for someone, and the impossible happens - for real - it makes you damn glad to be alive.

It ain't over, of course. There's still a World Series to be played. But for me, it almost seems like an anticlimax, practically irrelevant compared to tonight. Whether they win or lose the Series, the Red Sox and their fans have a hell of a moment, one that'll last for years to come.

And those of us who believe - no matter what or who we believe in - we do, too.