World champs

Wrigley Field, Chicago.  Where I saw my first major league baseball game.  I was still just a boy, barely in my teens, visiting a friend in the north Chicago suburb of Wilmette. 

As I recall, we two kids went to the game on our own, by rapid transit.  Back when kids did things like that.  Before parents managed their children's daily lives, even their college lives, and ventured on campus to debate their offsprings' low grades with their professors.

But I digress.

The Cubs played the Giants that afternoon.  The Giants, then calling the New York Polo Grounds their home, won.  Of course.  They went on to win the pennant, and to sweep the World Series.  Against whom?  Against the Cleveland Indians.

The Cubs hadn't won a World Series in 46 years.  They were already considered lovable losers.  I bought a Cubs pennant on a stick that I flew at half mast whenever the Cubs lost.  It was usually at half mast.  But I doubt that even Chicago pessimists realized that another 62 years would pass before the Cubs redeemed themselves.  Young men of 25, attending that game with my friend and me, lamenting the past 46 years of futility, would become feeble elders of 87 before their team was once more crowned World Champions. 

Last night the Cubs won -- against Cleveland -- despite themselves and despite a couple of questionable pitching changes.  I had already composed the announcement "Cubs Coug It" for my Facebook page.  But the Cubbies ultimately pulled through.  Only in the tenth inning, and only by one run, but none of that matters now. 

My early enthusiasm for the Cubs faded, especially after the Giants became the San Francisco Giants.  It was miraculous to have major league baseball -- always an eastern phenomenon -- anywhere on the West Coast.  The Northwest Corner -- home to no major league team, and still considered Indian-infested wilderness by the rest of the nation -- happily adopted the Giants as their own.  Until the Mariners came to town.

The Mariners.  While they can't compete with the pre-2016 Cubs in the antiquity of their futility, they perhaps approach the Cubs in its intensity.  But hey, give us another hundred years, and who knows what may happen?

But somewhere deep inside, like much of the nation, I've always retained a soft spot in my heart for the Cubbies. Congratulations, Chicago!