Nightmares do end, happy endings can occur and people often go on to lead lives no longer crippled by the past.
I just thought I’d throw that out there.
The Cubs are down 2-0 to the Mets in the National League Championship Series, and things look dark. Cubs fans know darkness the way they know air. You know who else knows darkness? Theo Epstein, and this is where our uplifting message of the day begins.
But first the darkness.
In 1986, the Cubs president of baseball operations was 12, an innocent, really, a kid minding his own business but thinking lofty thoughts. His Red Sox were about to win the World Series! What joy! What a beautiful world he had been born into!
He and his twin brother, Paul, were at home, watching Game 6 against the Mets. The Red Sox finally were going to end their long title drought.
“We decided we didn’t want to be connected to the earth when the last out went into the glove,’’ Epstein said. “So we stood on top of our parents’ couch with two outs in the (10th) inning. We were going to jump off when the last out went in the glove. We were on that couch for about 25 minutes.’’
That’s because – stop me if you’ve heard this story – a ball rolled through Bill Buckner’s legs in that inning, pretty much kicking the entire population of Boston between the legs. What had been a 5-3 Red Sox lead eventually became a 6-5 loss.
“We ended up crumbling to the ground pathetically,’’ Epstein said. “We just sat there for half an hour.’’
It was the baseball fetal position. Or, as Cubs fans call it, yoga.
“That one hurt,’’ Epstein said. “When you’re 12 years old, that’s a tough one to recover from. I remember going to school the next day. The teacher said, ‘Well, that was a tough one last night, but there’s still Game 7. How many of you kids think the Red Sox are going to come back and win Game 7?’
“A bunch of us raised our hands. He said, ‘You fools! They have no shot in the world!’ Sure enough, they didn’t.’’
The Mets won Game 7 and claimed their first World Series title since 1969, the season in which they overcame a nine-game division lead by the Cubs. You might have heard that 1969 story too.
You can see why Epstein has such a bond with Cubs fans, whose team hasn’t won a World Series since 1908. It’s a kinship born of sorrow.
“I feel particularly prepared to work for the Cubs, having suffered as a Red Sox fan growing up,’’ Epstein said. “There are so many similarities, from the passion to the heartbreak to the hope.’’
Hope. There is hope. The 12-year-old boy eventually became the general manager of the Red Sox. In 2003, his team was five outs away from going to the World Series but lost to the Yankees in Game 7 of the American League Championship Series. Sound familiar? In 2003, the Cubs were five outs away from going to the World Series but blew Game 6 of the NLCS to the Marlins in catastrophic fashion.
The next year, the Red Sox lost the first three games to the Yankees in the ALCS, ended up taking the next four and went on to win the World Series for the first time since 1918.
The light had finally drilled through the darkness.
The lesson being: It can happen. A 2-0 series deficit to the Mets looks grim, especially with hard-throwing Jacob deGrom on the mound for New York in Game 3 Tuesday. But Epstein saw firsthand in Boston how the past can be tamed.
“Two different experiences but there are a lot of similarities there that are impossible to ignore,’’ he said. “… Here, this has been more of a gradual build where we started from the bottom up, putting something together over a three-year period to get here.’’
So here the Cubs are, and, no, it doesn’t look good. Their best two pitchers, Jon Lester and Jake Arrieta, already have lost. But the team had a knack of coming back to win games during the regular season, and a comeback now is not unthinkable. The next three games are at Wrigley Field. The weather is expected to be warmer than it was for the first two games in New York, but so is Anchorage, Alaska’s. That should help.
Anything can happen. Epstein has helped make anything happen before. Now would be a good time to do it again. For all the 12-year-olds out there.
