2018 is mine

If you know me, you know my history with baseball, if you don’t here it is, I started to love baseball the day I saw this little guy in an Expos uniform pitch on ESPN back in 1994, that guy ended up being traded to the Boston Red Sox, because of that move I became an instant fan, but with the limited resources I had I started to realize that I just became a fan of a losing team, and no ordinary losing team, a team that redefined what losing meant.

Little by little I started to realize how bad all that losing felt in the hearts of an entire region. Not just Boston from whom the team is from, but the entire state of Massachusetts, and the other states that form the New England region (Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine and Connecticut) years and years of despair and suffering all thanks to one team.

I wondered “but Boston has other winning teams. I mean the Celtics has the most championships in the NBA, Bruins are pretty good too, great history and they have some banners to show and the Patriots are becoming a dynasty” but if you have been in Boston, you realize that it’s Red Sox or bust. I did my pilgrimage in 2016. I got off Kenmore Station and I saw the big CITGO sign and I started to feel the history I’ve read so much about, once I got to see the green monster with my own two eyes I started to cry, an ugly cry. I made it. The thing is that during my stay in Boston I saw nothing but Red Sox jerseys, shirseys and tshirts, some Celtics jerseys and even less Bruins gear. Boston, whether you like it or not is Red Sox country

I made their suffering mine, I remember so vividly when Aaron Boone hit the home run off Tim Wakefield in the ALCS 2003, it hurt but I couldn’t imagine how much “real fans” (fans from childhood, by birth or just because it’s was their city, state or region) hurt from the same play. I read about ’86, I read about ’78, I read about ’75, I read about ’67, I read about the fact that one of the greatest players who ever lived never got a championship almost because he played his entire career in Boston (it’s clearer now that had nothing to do with a curse, the issue was the fact that the ownership was quite racist)

When the Sox won it all in ’04 I felt happy, but to be honest I always felt more happy coming back from the 3-0 deficit against the MFY than winning the World Series, that happiness I left it to the “real fans” and to those who never saw them win and left our world not being able to saw them either.

It’s funny how things intertwine. My favorite football (or soccer as you call it) team also went on a long championship drought, we were even relegated to second division in our worst moment in history but after 25 years we won it all and almost reestablish our position as constant winners since that win in '94. Same has happened with the Red Sox. In the last 15 years they have become the only team to win 4 World Series in this new millennium, something similar to what happened at the beginning of the XX century when everything seemed like the Sox were going to become a huge dynasty. With the new millenium history seems to have rebooted, now it's our opportunity. 

2004 was for the ones that left us with see the team win it all. 2007 was for the next generation. 2013 was a surprise, nobody expected it, it was for the city and their resiliency and 2018 feels like it’s for fans like me. Still hasn’t sunk in the fact that we won. The other ones I felt like I wasn’t part of it, with this one I finally felt them like my team. I don’t know if it was thanks to the fact that I went to Boston to see them live, that I even made the trip to Stade Fasciste to see them play against the MFY, perhaps. i really don't know. All I know is that I feel it mine, finally mine.