There's No Crying in Baseball

For those of you who are tired of non-poker, Red Sox-based content, please come back tomorrow.

My phone rang at about 12:18 AM this morning. I knew who it was. My dad wanted to congratulate me for being alive to see the Sox win the World Series. You see, there are millions of people who've cheered for the Sox their entire lives praying that one day it might happen. And there are millions of people who didn't get to see it.

My grandmother, my only surviving grandparent and a huge Sox fan, was six when they last won. She was born the same year Fenway Park opened and used to always describe for me how my late grandfather listened to the Sox games his final years before MS took his life. She would remind me of the time one of my uncles threw the radio through the window after Game 7 in 1946. The window wasn't open at the time.

Perhaps I'm placing too much importance on such a relatively minor event. I'm open to that possibility. But for me, someone who's invested over 30 years of emotional energy on a team that had been cursed (yes, cursed) for decades, it was an amazing experience.

That they won is huge in and of itself. How they won is amazing. The Sox-Yankees rivalry is the most heated in all of professional sports. To have come back from a 3-0 deficit was borderline miraculous.

It need not be said that I'm a huge baseball fan. My kids names are Morgan (daughter) and Jackson (son) - it's only a partial coincidence that those are the names of MVP award-winners from the 1970's.

I have the entire game on TiVo and plan on getting it to DVD eventually. I can't wait to watch it with my kids and pass down to them the feelings of watching the Sox win a World Championship.

For any sports fans reading this, I honestly hope you get to experience this once in your lives, I'll never forget it.