How it Looks in the Mind's Eye

It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today, October 2, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone.

--A. Barlett Giamatti, former President of both Yale and the National League. This is the first paragraph of his 1977 essay The Green Fields of the Mind, recalling the Red Sox collapse of 1975.

* * *It happened again after the Cubs took a slim lead: as I watched Rich Harden pitch, I was not thinking about whether the Cubs would win the game; I was thinking about whether they will win the World Series. I can’t be the only one, right? We’ve reached that point now, haven’t we, where every game feels bigger than one game, at least at some point during the contest, as our mind drifts, searching for signals and signs, omens foreshadowing the future of our team, the 2008 Chicago Cubs?

Maybe it’s just me, anyway, but I can’t help myself. I can’t stay in the present. (continue...)

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Westside Wavelength