April 23, 2008...1:53 pm
Sap? You Want Sap? I’ll Give You Sap!
It’s been a while. And so we here at Um have decided to ease ourselves back in to the game. What’s this mean for you? A SENTIMENTAL SPORTS COLUMN!
Over the last two decades of this past century, certain members of the sports media took full advantage of a supposed curse that kept the Boston Red Sox from winning baseball’s World Series. Larry Barnett blows a call? Blame the Babe. Bucky F. Dent hits a well-timed (and rare) homerun? Blame the Babe. A crippled Bill Buckner lets the ball go through his legs (after his team truly, collectively conspired to turn the game of baseball into a circus)? Blame the Babe. Aaron Boone smacks a homerun off, gasp, a knuckleball pitcher? Blame the Babe.
And now the man who Carl Everett named the Curly-haired boyfriend is a gagillionaire. Ugh.
After 2004, this was all supposed to be old news: Series won, curse vanquished, right? Well, sort of. Despite their eventual, convincing dispatch of the St. Louis Cardinals, the members of that Red Sox team seemed to be enjoying little more than a novelty. One Series win in 86 years? Pshaw.
Then came last year. And another calm lift from the jaws of elimination and another totally dominating performance in the final round of baseball’s playoffs went a long way to putting the worst of all sports distractions deep underground.
But I wasn’t truly convinced until this past weekend. That’s when, while at the wedding of a couple of friends, I heard a very young man call himself a Red Sox fan with no real geographic reason to do so. Maybe this fella found his interest pulled by something that had nothing whatsoever to do with that franchise’s recent success. But I doubt it.
More likely is the possibility that now, nearly a century after the last time a loyal BoSoxer could claim allegiance to a (knock wood) budding dynasty, a different sort of curse–that of perpetual hopelessness–has finally been lifted. And the rest of the so-interested sporting world can feel it.
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