I feel bad for Cubs fans. I really do.
Don't get me wrong — I'm happy for them, too. As a lifelong Red Sox fan, the night 12 years ago when the Sox put their curse to bed is one I'll never forget. After the game, the streets were jammed and horns were blaring. I hugged and cried with strangers. The clock turned back for one night, and all in New England became little children again, filled with wonder, awe and joy. It felt like the safest mob imaginable.
With a second miracle in hand, Theo Epstein, the architect of my Boston Red Sox team as well as these Chicago Cubs, now seems as if he can now coast through life until he is canonized.
It's been a wonderful story to follow. Baseball is part of our national DNA. It lends itself well to myths. For years, the Yankees were the Goliath of these stories, and the Sox and Cubs kept loading their slingshot, forever waiting on fortune to turn. We even see their ballparks as cathedrals of sorts, where we assemble to pray for the same thing, that some higher power will break the curses that smite us.
But for me, something died the night the Red Sox won. Yes, the burdens I'd been carrying since the 1970s were lifted. I didn't exactly know what was different, but something was (and not for the better). The list of bargains I had offered my higher power for that moment was extensive, and now, like a first kiss or high school, that moment was gone. Forever.
The Red Sox have won it all twice since then, but they can never touch The Nation (as Sox fans call themselves) as deeply as they did that night. Winning became so commonplace that the goat of the 1986 World Series, Bill Buckner, was completely forgiven. How long will it be before Steve Bartman, the foul-ball-interfering fan who's been blamed for the Cubs 2003 playoff collapse, is just another Chicagoan wearing a blue-and-red cap in the Windy City?
In the winter after the Sox won, everyone across the country shared our joy, even fans of the vanquished Yankees. Almost everyone was glad to see our pain ease. Those days are gone.
The curse is just folklore. Now, we're seen as entitled, obnoxious and privileged. There's more than a kernel of truth to it, too. Where others once saw an admirable loyalty in our clan, sometime since 2004 it has been replaced with a smugness. We're now a "have" instead of a "have-not," and, for whatever reason, our hearts tend to favor the have-nots.
