High Fives With Strangers

It’s 1:25 a.m. on Monday as I write this, and the Red Sox have just won their second World Series of my lifetime.

The Thirsty Scholar is right around the corner from me, and I honestly don’t go there enough. It was packed to the rafters tonight when we headed over between the 7th and 8th innings to watch the end of the game with fans rather than alone. I watched a few of the other playoff games there, and it’s a great feeling to be surrounded by people with whom you share a common goal (albeit one you can’t really contribute to), even if you share nothing else. John (Emlyn) made that point well in his comment on the previous post: The Sox hold Boston together like nothing else. Call it the history, call it the proximity (Fenway just seems so much more “in-town” than even the Fleet Center/TD Banknorth Garden/Whateverthehellitis), call it whatever. The Sox pull us all together. As I walked home, you could already hear the car horns and screaming celebrants echoing through the streets.

Just because I can, I’ll leave you with some mildly pretentious words written on the same occasion in 2004, after a stroll down into Copley Square.

The moon shone through a haze of cigar smoke as it came out of eclipse over Copley Square around midnight, as October 27 became October 28, and a generations-long drought finally came to an end. Perhaps the stellar conjunction was appropriate, given the near-cosmic resonance this moment carries across New England.

The revelers walking through Copley may or may not have noticed the words carved on thes tones under their feet, part of the Boston Marathon monument, which quotes Tennyson’s Ulysses:

“One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

For a nation of fans who’ve waited eighty-nine years (since before women could vote, as the TV helpfully pointed out), these words seem equally applicable. This is a drought that outlived a major superpower, for crying out loud (Soviet Union, 1917-1990).

It would, of course sound sacreligious to compare this to any other event in sports history, but in my brief perambulations, I was reminded of the 2001 Super Bowl. It was my junior year at Johns Hopkins, and the Ravens hadonly been in town a few years, ending a long absence of football from a football-loving town. I had attended the game that clinched them a playoff berth, so I had witnessed some of the excitement that finally came to a boil that night, but it was nothing compared to what we saw cruising downtown after the game. People ran between the lanes of parked-car traffic, slapping hands with the people sitting on the windowsills of their car doors. Pretty wild stuff, all in all.