Friday, October 17, 2008

96 TEARS.

I cried last night when that final HR was hit. I cried as the Red Sox ran into the dogpile and “Dirty Water” blared out of the speakers. I had stayed up to watch the festivities, but I ended up making TBF hit the OFF button on the remote. I didn’t cry because I’m a Rays fan (although of course readers of this blog will already know that I am rooting hard for Cliff Floyd) or because I’m a Red Sox fan (there is some of that, by proxy). I cried because I said I wasn’t going to watch October baseball and then found myself watching baseball the last few nights and got sucked into the emotion of it again, the feeling of sitting and watching and praying and waiting and hoping.

Last night, I was most struck the pallor of silence that hung over the ballpark. I know that silence, the one that happens when you don’t even dare to breathe for fear that slight motion will somehow interfere with gravitational access and cosmic destiny. Everyone at Fenway was sitting down. People looked alternately grim and carefree. I resonated with the sad faces and wanted to throttle the oblivious ones. I wanted to take the dumb girl yakking on the cell phone out of her seat, dump a beer on her head on principle, and stick my friend Lisa in that seat instead. I wanted to trip the hordes of people heading down the ramps in the 7th inning (and my first thought last night when Big Papi hit that 3-run homer was, Don’t you feel like IDIOTS now, suckers, that’ll teach you to leave a PLAYOFF GAME AT FENWAY early).

In so many ways, I wanted to be there. (And not just because I wanted to have a word or two with the woman wearing full Phillies regalia right behind home plate.)

“I wonder how they feel,” I asked TBF last night, while it was still 7-0. “Is it better to have gotten here and lose it now or better to not have have gotten this far?”
“It’s different,” he said. “It’s not going to hurt as much. I mean, they’ve been twice in four years. It’s not like us losing in 2006.”

Which was, of course, what I was ultimately getting at, but not talking about, because in our house we are still not talking about it. The final game still sits on the DVR and the closing ceremony still sits on the DVR and I do not know when we will ever be able to watch them. (We still can’t watch Mr. Met saying goodbye to Shea without things getting a little misty.) I am grateful that the City of New York has fenced off Shea so I can’t head out there with my photoblogger friends and try to urban explore. I don’t even have the heart to fight with the Mets Ticket Office.

So I watched last night, for Texy and Lisa and other friends and acquaintences of the Red Sox persuasion, but I also watched for myself, and I am glad that I did. For a little reminder of why I do this, a reminder far enough removed that it doesn’t hurt too much.