I Bleed Blue

It’s Friday, October 7th, 2016.

7:30 AM.

I am typically never awake at this time.

But today is a day unlike any other.

Today is a day for baseball.

CUBS baseball.

The only constant in my entire life has been being a Chicago Cubs fan.  I suppose if I had to get a tattoo, a Cubs logo would be appropriate… although I’d put that thing straight on my ass to symbolize all of the pain that this team has given me over my lifetime…

Although some fans have had it worse.  Far worse.  Some people, like my Grandpa (now deceased), had been Cubs fans their whole lives and had never seen them win a championship.  A baseball is white and interlaced with little red stitches, which help give the players grip when they throw the ball.  The number of stitches on every baseball?  108.  The same amount of years since the Cubs won their last championship.

That’s a sign.

Or is it?

Last year was the year the Cubs were supposed to win everything: “Back to the Future”, a movie made in 1985, predicted it.  The Cubs got close–they were one of the final 4 teams–then they got their asses handed to them by the New York Mets.  It was tragic.  I cried.

And here I am, crying again—three times already—before they have even played a single playoff game.  That game is in 12 hours.  The reason I am unable to sleep.  The reason I am still in Chicago, despite my career path pointing me to moving to Los Angeles, a move I should have made yesterday.

The Cubs have a long path ahead of them.  Baseball in October is a perilous journey.  They need 11 wins to become World Champions.  They are allowed no more than 8 losses.  Their first opponents, from San Francisco, have won every championship on the even numbered years since 2010.  It won’t be an easy journey.

What an understatement that is.

Curses, implosion, injuries—everything that could have gone wrong over the years, has.  Even in years when they were CLEARLY the best team in baseball, they would get into the post-season, and somehow manage to fuck it up.  I was there in 2008, sitting in the bleachers for the first game, confident they would win their first playoff game after winning their division.

They lost.  In fact, they got swept (lost all their games to Los Angeles) and were eliminated.

This year, the Cubs were far and above the best team in all of baseball.  Out of 30 teams, the Cubs were the only one to win more than 100 games.  They broke history countless times.  It was a season of highs, and more highs.  I can remember a handful of times when they were losing a game, and the “realist” in me had given up on them, only to be flipping through the TV channels some minutes later to learn that miraculously, they had surmounted a comeback.  It seems like they could always find a way.

For me, the Chicago Cubs are not merely a baseball team.  I’m not the biggest fan of the sport anyhow.  But the Cubs are something else.  Something otherworldly.  They represent, on their smallest scale, a city.  A city whose inhabitants and whose influence have percolated throughout this country, and occasionally throughout the planet.  Kids who had grown up, watching their favorite baseball team, never being treated to the ultimate dessert, the satisfaction of being the best.  Those kids have since gotten older, married, took jobs that moved them out of Chicago.  But they never gave up on their team.  They never stopped hoping, wherever they were in their lives, that that same baseball team they had been lulled to as children, would somehow do the improbable, and end the drought, end the madness, silence the naysayers, and win that coveted championship once and for all.

If you are not a Cubs fan, then maybe you aren’t able to sympathize with me or my plight.  Maybe you are a fan of the other Chicago baseball team, or even worse, a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals.  You don’t want to see the Cubs win, and that’s fine.  But do you want to see a legion of people with a collective weight lifted off their shoulders?  Do you want to see people, who have been devout fans for over a CENTURY, be able to die with a smile on their face?  Do you want to see Loretta Dolan’s loyalty pay off?

 

The day of reckoning is upon us.  Today, it begins.  No more questions, no more doubts, no more concerns, no more tears–it is only time to watch, and hope, and dream, for the sweetest victory of all.

Go Cubs Go.

Please.