NO TEAM HAS EVER

In the back room of the bar in New Jersey last night, a hoarse-voiced man was singing about the impossibility of love and the inevitability of pain, the kind of pain that does justice to metaphors about the bottom of the ocean and the blackness of the night. In the front of the bar, on a flat-screen TV, the impossible was happening, and the fans of the man who sang for the impossible and the team who played for the impossible ran back and forth between the front and the back of the bar, screaming themselves hoarse for both.

Because: If a team from Massachusetts can beat a bankrolled team in pinstripes, and maybe go on to beat a team from Texas, maybe a Seantor from Massachusetts can beat a pinstripe-bankrolled man from Texas.

Because: I owe the Red Sox a karmic debt from 1986, specifically the day I realized that if I hoped for anything hard enough, my faith could become a will so powerful it could reach across the borough of Queens and send a ground ball through the legs of a first baseman and keep my hope alive.

Because: I only later realized that the greatest day of my sports fan career was in fact the worst nightmare of many less fortunate sports fans, that victory in battle comes at the expense of someone else’s suffering.

Because: Without defeat, we would not understand victory. Without pain, we would not know joy.

Because: Red is the color of commies, and anarchists, and blood, and rage, and love, and only in a system so inverted that up is down and war is freedom and oppression is justice and endless violence is safety would red be the color of states full of people who swallow supersize lies with their supersize fries.

Because: If this is possible, then anything is possible.

Because: For the first time in such a long time, I BELIEVE.

GO SOX.