Pay a buck. Download this song. 10/28/04 Anyone can have a bad century. Hell has frozen over. Pigs are flying. The fat lady has sung. It's not some feel-good movie about the poetry and lyricism of baseball. The unthinkable happened, the thing a lot of us have been waiting a lifetime for. And frankly, I'm not sure exactly how we're supposed to handle it. You most likely won't understand this if you're not a Bostonian or a Sox fan or some combination thereof, but this morning I feel a little lost. This woe-is-me, bad luck, Shleprock, inferiority complex thing I've been carrying around for my entire life is supposedly lifted. And there's a hole. It's hard to explain. It's not that you don't have faith. But it's a hopeless faith. It's more that you're perpetually prepared for the inevitable, the heartbreaking loss. And strangely, there's comfort in the heartbreak. “There's always next year” isn't “there's always next year” anymore. It's this year. “There's always next year,” takes on a whole new meaning, as it now refers to that potential for a return to the hopeless romanticism that has dogged Red Sox fans for a very long time. I've been talking to Joe and a lot of other like-minded folks this week, and there's a lot of “can-you-believe-this?” talk going on. When Joe got married last year, a lot of journalists and fans wondered if his songwriting would change. We had a good laugh over that, because – and I'm revealing company secrets here – Joe's not quite the sad sack people might expect. But, the Red Sox winning the World Series could actually be the kind of thing that does change his work to come. I don't think I am being dramatic; how the disappearance of this light grey cloud that has informed our entire lives affects us still remains to be seen. It's kind of like being Irish all your life, and then waking up one day and finding out you're not Irish anymore. You're minus the expected melancholy. It's like Rosanne winning the lottery. On the surface, it seems like a good thing, but so much of your identity is wrapped up in the melancholy, that the absence changes you, and it ruins the show. And then there's Manny. Manny, who was put on WAIVERS and unclaimed, then traded as part of the aborted A-Rod thing, rises up to embrace the game and the season and go on to be the Series MVP. You couldn't make up a story like that. Joyce
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