So yesterday at the office, the umpteenth person comes up to me and says, “How are you doing?”
And I nod and I smile because I know what they mean. They know I’m the guy who does that “blog thing” and lives and dies with the Red Sox and once threatened a conference room full of prospects when one of them copped to being a Yankees fan.
But the thing is, I’m doing fine.
No more Red Sox baseball? Sucks. But whereas 2003 saw me bedridden and bedraggled, sick to my stomach and lost in clouds of despair, the new, post-2004 and -2007 me knows that these days, “maybe next year” really means “maybe next year.” And Red Sox championships aren’t the sort of things that poke their heads out of Loch Ness once in a blue moon, then disappear without a trace. They’re real, baby. And they’re spectacular.
So when I see these articles like this one in the Globe in which a local funeral director — yeah, you read that right — offers hints for overcoming the shock of the postseason’s abrupt ending, I just nod and smile. I paid my dues in 2003. And when the bad vibes set in, as they did earlier this week, I just dig on this:
Doesn’t that make everything better?
Knowing how it all went down, it’s tough to remember that when this occured, we were three games down and three outs away from the Big Sleep. We had nothing but that moment, that steal, that at bat. A park packed with people begging for just another inning of Red Sox baseball, clinging tenaciously to whatever remnants of the season we could get our mitts on. We didn’t know where it was heading; we just knew we didn’t want to say goodbye. And the boys came through furiously.
There’s enough emotion in that one-and-a-half minute clip to get me through the rest of my days. Thanks again, dudes.
