Yet another autumn for impossible dream

6 October 2004

I wake and there's a Victoria's Secret model in my bed: long lean, and barely dressed in some frilly black lace. I blink, rub my eyes, and look again. It's my wife.

Cool.

The children bound into the kitchen, give me heartfelt hugs, and proceed to make their own breakfasts. "Hey, Dad," says my youngest. "Look at my report card. Straight As."

"Me too," says her sister. "Also, here's a note from the principal, about some college scholarship I won."

Cool.

Outside the temperature is right on that magical cusp between crisp and warm. A light breeze blows, the sky is the deepest blue I have ever seen, and the October leaves are exceptionally vivid hues of red, yellow and orange. "Heel," I say to the dog and he snaps to, staying precisely by my left side. We walk into 7-Eleven for some milk and just for a lark I buy a scratch ticket. Sure enough, I've won a million bucks.

Cool.

My editor calls. "Brilliant column, as always," she says. "By the way, the Pulitzer Prize committee just called. Congratulations."

Glorious day; glorious times. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Wonderful things are happening to everybody. After all, the Red Sox just won the World Series.

OK, in some tucked away corner of our minds we all know this is fantasy. If the Curse is broken 25 days or so from now, little will change. The next day we will wake up as usual and go to work as usual. Our voices may be hoarser from screaming at the television, particularly if Terry Francona seems to be keeping a certain tiring pitcher on the mound for a little too long. We may have plans for a noontime celebration at City Hall Plaza. Heck, if we're students at Northeastern University we may be in jail on charges of disorderly conduct, waiting for our parents to come and spring us.

Yet fundamentally, nothing will be different. Our lives will proceed along as they have.

It doesn't feel that way right now, though, does it?

The start of a new baseball season each spring may kindle hope, but it is in October that the fire burns brightest. Loyal fans slog through the excruciatingly long season, enduring an agonizing cycle of ups and downs. As the playoffs loom, however - and increasingly, it seems, the Sox are a regular fixture in those playoffs - interest in the team's prospects broadens. With rare exceptions, baseball becomes the preoccupation of everyone living north of Hartford.

It is an extraordinary and hard-to-explain phenomenon. Why do we care so passionately about something that doesn't mean anything?

Some see that passion as a sad commentary on American culture; we are obsessed, they say, with the trivial and the frivolous. The criticism become particularly acute when one compares the playoffs to another contest occurring at the same time - the presidential race. Yet despite the fact that this election includes a hometown favorite, most of us are far more engaged in the minutiae of the Red Sox than we are in the day-to-day of the candidates' campaigns.

The criticism is wrong, I think. Despite the claims of some insiders, politics is not sports, not even in Boston. Most of us, I suspect, already know for whom we will vote. The campaigns, while perhaps tactically interesting, are not profoundly important to our lives. What is profoundly important, however, is who wins.

In sports, Vince Lombardi notwithstanding, winning is not the point.

That may seem like heresy, especially after an 86-year drought. Yet consider what has happened since 1918. Red Sox nation has emerged, defined not by the team's victories, but rather by its striving. In a sense, the saga of the Sox is similar to tales such as "The Iliad" or even "The Wizard of Oz." All are forms of what is called a heroic quest. In those stories, the heroes are beset by enemies and tested by adversity. They suffer and struggle, sometimes winning, sometimes losing and always learning a lot about themselves along the way. It is not the end that matters, but rather the journey. Indeed, when the end comes, successful or not, we find ourselves vaguely disappointed (think "The Lord of the Rings"), wishing somehow that the characters could be united once more.

Baseball, in other words, is less like politics than it is like literature.

All of which raises the question: What happens if hell freezes over and the Red Sox do win the World Series? With the quest at an end, does baseball no longer matter? Do we abandon the team for something else? Does Red Sox Nation cease to exist?

No. For then we set ourselves a new goal, a sequel, if you will, one well known to New Yorkers and recently discovered by fans of the Patriots.

Dynasty.