That loud thud you heard late Wednesday night was the sound of the Boston Red Sox and their exhausted fans dumping 86 years of accumulated baggage off their shoulders.
Imagine the load: the Curse of the Bambino. Bill Buckner. Aaron Boone. Bucky @#$%^& Dent. And dozens of other half-forgotten villains, victims, blunders and embarrassments.
The Red Sox won four World Series between 1912 and 1918, and their fans assumed the success would continue. But then the Red Sox's owner, short-sighted and short of cash, sold his best player, Babe Ruth, to the New York Yankees, setting in motion a run of bad fortune that didn't end until Wednesday night.
The Sox still might not win the World Series, but they've already accomplished something that most of their fans consider much more important: They knocked off the Yankees - the "Evil Empire," according to one of the Red Sox's new owners - who have won 26 World Series to Boston's zero since they had the Bambino dropped into their lap in 1920.
The Red Sox didn't just beat the Yankees for the American League pennant. They beat them in Yankee Stadium, scene of so many Red Sox meltdowns over the decades. They shrugged all that weight off their shoulders as easily as Pedro Martinez shrugged off a charging Don Zimmer a year ago. And they did it by becoming the first team in baseball's postseason history to come back from a 0-3 deficit.
Which made the Yankees the first team to blow a 3-0 lead. You don't want to get a phone call from George Steinbrenner today, especially if you've become accustomed to cashing a Yankee paycheck.
Some people have tried to turn the Red Sox-Yankees series into a metaphor for this year's presidential campaign. The Democrats held their convention in Boston and nominated a Massachusetts senator who, in a rare moment of political candor, admitted he is a Red Sox fan. The Republicans held their convention in New York City. The Red Sox are a bunch of scruffy guys who look as if they might be Democrats if they didn't make so much money. The Yankees are uniformly clean-cut and conservative, on orders of Steinbrenner, who once got into trouble for illegal campaign contributions to a Republican president. (The Red Sox chairman is a Kerry contributor.)
We don't buy into those comparisons. As President Bush would say, the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry is really a battle between the haves and the have-mores. Just ask the Devil Rays.
Now it's on to the World Series, where, depending on the outcome, the Red Sox can cap off a great season or throw some fresh baggage onto their shoulders.
