For Boston, times have now changed

For over a century, baseball has played the role of benevolent entertainment for America, but that has not been true in Boston for a long time. At some point over the past few decades, the Boston Red Sox graduated from being entertainment to being a legitimate part of their fandom's lives, emotional stability, and collective thought process. You see, the Red Sox had this albatross hanging around their necks. They had been close to winning the World Series, and they had failed. Over and over and over.

When a goal of ours is denied, we typically fight back, struggling for a while before giving up to protect ourselves against undue turmoil. Bostonians, in their genuine enjoyment of the Red Sox and apparent lack of foresight, went along for the ride. There was no rational reason why the glory of winning five championships would not return after a while, right?

Wrong. The glory never did return. The Red Sox could not win the World Series. From 1918 on, generations were born, generations died. Wars started, wars ended. We started doing crazy things like driving cars and flying in planes and listening to the radio and watching television. And just as those new pieces of society began as foreign to us and eventually forced their way into our immediate conscience, so did the Red Sox.

What set the Red Sox apart from other teams was that instead of simply always being Boston's plaything, Boston was always putty in the hands of the Red Sox. The most amazing part of their futility, of course, is the way they did it. Rather than being really bad for a really long time, like two Chicago baseball teams have managed to do, they were really good on a regular basis, and would somehow choke time after time. The Red Sox, of course, are the closest team in sports history to winning a championship without actually winning. One strike away in 1986. This kind of madness just compounded the obsession.

For a reason that is neither obvious nor sane, Red Sox Nation refused to give up each time they were punched in the stomach, but came back with more passion and ferocity. New Englanders grew to dip their emotions into the Sox with full knowledge that the failure would sting more than ever before, yet fans wanted so desperately for the pain to end that they exposed themselves again.

People will deny it, but failure really became the overriding mentality in Beantown. Even with all of Boston's triumphs, a defining identity was that the baseball team couldn't win the World Series. Whole generations of people roamed the streets aimlessly arguing about how somebody popped up that bunt, so-and-so is a bum, and (best of all) how "I could manage the Red Sox better than this guy." Bostonians wished they could make it stop, but they did not have the power. Their hearts, minds, and entire city were all held at the mercy of the triumphs, and more importantly failures, of a baseball team.

The way of life in New England has been turned completely on its head. It became more and more obvious Wednesday night that this year was not just a tease, that the comeback against the Yankees was not a setup, and that this 3-0 World Series lead could not possibly be blown even by the Red Sox. So during those middle and late innings, it was hard to know what to feel. It wasn't a "wow, we're going to win," it was more in the category of "we're going to win, now what?"

To paraphrase Johnny Carson on the Ford-Carter presidential race in 1976, this was about the fear of the unknown versus fear of the known. Either they finally kill us by somehow losing it, or they actually win. And they actually did, sending the Hub into euphoria and a massive identity crisis.

Without complaining, because no Red Sox fan is, life without their disastrous failures to blame is a different proposition. Bostonians can live without the mentality that a piano is always about to fall out of the sky and crush them. A specific stress that has affected nearly every day of people's lives, some for more than 80 years, is gone. Waking up on Thursday, donning a Red Sox jacket still reeking of champagne from the night before, this writer could sense something different.

The quest is over. A part of this region had died, but a new era had begun. Life now is not what it used to be. It is not as if things are not as they should be, though; more accurately, the universe was off-kilter for 86 years, and now things are fine.