{"id":1573,"date":"2004-10-30T19:35:54","date_gmt":"2004-10-30T23:35:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/nateptest\/2004\/10\/30\/red-sox-nation-exhaustion\/"},"modified":"2004-10-30T19:35:54","modified_gmt":"2004-10-30T23:35:54","slug":"red-sox-nation-exhaustion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/2004\/10\/30\/red-sox-nation-exhaustion\/","title":{"rendered":"Red Sox Nation Exhaustion"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

I’ve been meaning to write, but I’ve been sucked deep into the bowels of Red Sox
\nNation for the last three weeks, so like everyone else here in New England, I
\nhave been subsisting on too little sleep for too many
\ndays.<\/p>\n

{pictureRef (\"\", align:”left”)}It’s been a mad whirlwind of
\na baseball ride here.  Two weekends ago, BF and I were on the
\nSouth Shore of Mass. Bay (about 25 miles to the south of Boston on the
\ncoast), on a weekend retreat with the other graduate students in his
\ndepartment, and we were there, soaked in misery and gin, the night that
\nthe Sox lost to the Yankees 19-8.  Ignominious.  Everyone was
\nat the point of crying, yet again, as it looked like another year of
\noh-so-familiar defeat for Boston.  But then they started to
\nwin.  Unbelievably, they couldn’t seem to be killed.  On
\nMonday night, I finally gave up past 1 AM in the 13th inning, and heard
\nlater that they won in the fourth.  On Tuesday, when it took 6
\nhours for them to win for the third time in a row, I was there for
\nalmost the whole thing, except for the hour of the game that occurred
\nwhile I was in class.  Every pitch in the final two inning was
\nagony; the friends I was watching the game with paced the floor,
\ngroaned painfully, and could barely look through their fingers to see
\nhow each ball thrown had fared.  On Wednesday, we watched for what
\nwas, in fact, hours, and again, the final two inning were an experiment
\nin masochism.  Brian, and my friend Mike, and a couple of other
\nNew Englanders were just waiting for the Sox to screw it up again, as
\nthey had so many times in the past.  Each bad pitch was met with
\nan exclamation like, “Oh, God, it’s starting.  They’re messing it
\nup.  Why is he in there?  We gotta take him out of the
\ngame.  They’ve killed our hopes so many times, why is this
\ndifferent.  Why did I even hope that it would happen this
\nyear?”  Red Sox fans (Bostonians, even New Englanders) are not an
\noptimistic people.  I think that if you lived here for any length
\nof time, with the provinciality, the weather, and whatever else, the
\nsunny elements of any person’s personality would be quickly burnished
\naway.<\/p>\n

But then they did it. 
\nSilence.  Then screams of joy.  We had defeated the “Evil Empire” in the House
\nthat Ruth Built, and we’d done what no other baseball team had ever done
\nbefore.  From 0-3 to 4-3, and the first time to the Series in 18 years.  We
\npoured out of the house where we were watching the game, and headed into Harvard
\nSquare.  Passing through Harvard Yard, we saw the jubilation.  The John Harvard
\nstatue dressed in Red Sox gear, the Harvard University band playing, Hundreds of
\nstudents bouncing up and down and yelling as loud as they could.  We passed
\nquickly into the square, and there, all traffic had been stopped.  Easily over a
\nthousand people thronged all over th square, covering the pedestrian zones, the
\nroads, the storefronts, basically any surface upon which one could stand.  The
\nband moved out and began to play even more loudly.  Cheers started: “Let’s go,
\nRed Sox!”, “Yankees Suck!”, “Here we go, Red Sox!”  We stayed for at least half
\nan hour, until about 1 AM, and the crowd never
\ndissipated.<\/p>\n

We got to sleep for two days.  Then,
\nthe series started, and all of Red Sox Nation went back to very late nights,
\nsitting on the edge of chairs, and waiting.  We drew blood from our knuckles as
\nwe chewed upon them, and we kept waiting for them to mess it up.  Only on the
\nthird night did people begin to think that it might happen.  Even on the fourth
\nnight, most of Red Sox Nation kept waiting for a shoe to drop somewhere.  And
\nthen it didn’t.  And New England exhaled after holding its breath for 86
\nyears.<\/p>\n

The last three days have been a whirl of
\nRed Sox Madness.  People still haven’t slept.  The victory parade was today, and
\nover three million people lined up on the parade route today, standing in the
\ncoolness and the drizzle for up to four hours to watch the team and the
\noldtimers still alive from previous attempts at the title ride by in Duck Boats.
\n(There are tours that you can take of Boston in Duck Boats, amphibious personnel
\ncarriers from military surplus that have been made into tour vehicles that drive
\nthe streets and then take a quick spin in the Charles River.)  The parade wound
\nall through downtown, and then it took a couple of laps along the river basin,
\nstaying close into the Boston and Cambridge
\nshores.<\/p>\n

Crazy stuff has been happening as a result
\nof this.  One local couple had originally taken their wedding vows years ago,
\npromising to remain together “until death do you part or the Red Sox win the
\nseries.”  They renewed their vows this week.  Grown men were moved to tears, as
\nthey recalled that their fathers and grandfathers had waited for this event for
\nmuch of their lives.  The Boston Globe put out its edition on Thursday with the
\nlargest headline I’ve ever seen (YES!!! in four-inch letters) and calling it the
\n“Victory edition.”  Sox retrospectives have been going on TV much of the latter
\nportion of the week.  Everywhere I go, I hear snatchets of people talking —
\npolice officers, construction workers, Harvard profs, bank tellers, merchants,
\nhomeless guys — talking about what many of them regard as perhaps the most
\nspectacular event of their lives.  Perhaps most surprisingly, Bostonians have
\nbeen remarkably cheerful on the streets, in trains, and in stores.  (This is
\nhighly unusual, especially as we’re moving deeper into autumn.)  They’re not
\neven thinking about next season and what it means to no longer be the perpetual
\nlosers of major league baseball (a role that seems left to the Cubs now. 
\nIncidentally, the Cubs are apparently SO cursed that even having ex-Cubs on your
\nteam means that you will lose.  In both of the last two series, the team with
\nthe most ex-Cubs lost — New York had 5, St. Louis 3, and Boston
\n2.).<\/p>\n

This city is sports-crazy, but this last week
\nhas been more than I can really describe adequately.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been meaning to write, but I’ve been sucked deep into the bowels of Red Sox Nation for the last three weeks, so like everyone else here in New England, I have been subsisting on too little sleep for too many days. {pictureRef (, align:”left”)}It’s been a mad whirlwind of a baseball ride here.  Two […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":709,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-day2day"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5G3PH-pn","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/709"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1573"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1573\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}