The Party's Over
By Karlsie
I wasn't ready for the season to be over. Like so many others, I believed that we would rise like a phoenix from the ashes - but we didn't. Buffett, who lifted Boston's curse so skillfully a year ago, did the same for Chicago this year. El Duque's pitching was a thing of beauty and Chicago simply outplayed us.
So it goes. Now it's time to fall back on old habits: wait until next year when the pressure is off and our pitchers are healthy. Wait and see what we do at the baseball meetings and in the off season. We will do it again and this time it won't take 86 years. Even the Patriots faltered in 2002 only to come back and make it clear they were a dynasty - we can do that too.
In the end, it can all be summed up in the words of Giamatti. The very words I used to read to my children as a bedtime story.
"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 it stopped. History repeated itself when Renteria made the final out - this time in the damp New England twilight of October. The season ended leaving me alone once again. I'll look at the photos and reread the notes I wrote on score cards in the dark winter nights, counting the months, weeks and finally the days until the truck leaves Fenway and pitchers and catchers report in. It is how I can visit the green field in my mind to warm me when the snow lays thick on the ground, covering the shattered pieces of my soul.
I just wasn't ready for baseball to be over yet - but just wait until next year.
