I write this on a crisp October morning, just a few days before the Red Sox will play in game one (eh hem, Game One) of the World Series. The team’s great regular season and exciting postseason run has people in town thinking and talking about the team. Inevitably, this has led to a new small-talk question in the past week or so – hey, how about the Sox? In the past, my answer would have been easy – I’m pumped, I'm absolutely pumped. Or, actually, I should say, it would have been more like – actually, I’m pretty nervous, but they got it. Either way, the answer would have originated from the same place, one of obsessed fandom that left me suspect to wild swings of emotion based on whether the team had hit enough dingers the night before. I was into the Sox and the Sox were into me.
This formed a part of a larger persona, almost a caricature really, of The Boston Sports Fan, a role I played almost flawlessly from the moment I arrived alone and friendless at college. If a ball or puck bounced under the Boston sun, I knew about it, and I made it known that I took my knowledge as seriously as anything else to which I’d committed my time and energy. My fandom was such that it made me natural friend and foil to my equivalent classmates from around the country, strange species I classified as the New York Sports Nut or the Bay Area Sports Fanatic, and undoubtedly our shared interest in sports contributed to how we graduated four years later with not just diplomas but as lifelong friends as well.
Inevitably things, as things tend to do, ended. In the same way I stopped listening to Rush or no longer made time to shoot baskets down at the park, I lost my interest in keeping track of the wild card standings or looking up rumors about which shortstop was about to get traded. I don’t do this or the equivalent for any Boston team anymore. I’m sure the days of a shared commitment to American sports serving as a starting point are long over, a hypothesis supported by how the friendships I’ve made or cultivated in my post college years have lacked any trace of sporting interests at their foundations.
And yet, despite having moved on from the Sox, I couldn’t help but feel something as I walked through the city this past week and saw the familiar hats and t-shirt jerseys all around me. It was like unexpectedly hearing the bridge from an old song – suddenly, I’d remember the ending, and look forward to enjoying the rest of the familiar trip before the song was over. When I’ve been asked lately about my excitement for the Sox, I end up thinking back to when I was excited, and the names of all the players and the endings of the most important games come flooding back into my memory.
Sometimes, I think about how crazy it was that these games seemed so important. It’s unfathomable, really, that I used to get so wound up watching playoff games on TV that I would leave the house to listen to the late innings on a radio. It seems even crazier that when the Sox were on the verge of finally winning in 2004 that I agreed with a friend over lunch in the high school cafeteria to meet him halfway between our homes after the final out. But it did seem important at the time that we do something, anything, even just a high-five, to commemorate how unbelievable it was that a bunch of guys in matching outfits won a series of baseball games.
The popular narrative around here is that it all changed after that season, when the Sox finally won in 2004, and I suppose there must be some truth in it. But I still remember caring about the games. On perfect summer nights between college semesters, we’d go out on a bridge, the bridge blocked off to traffic because of construction, and we’d bring a radio and beach chairs and listen to that night’s Sox game as we sat by the water. I’d drink iced tea and my high school friends would smoke cloves and we’d wait together for the game to finish or the bridge to get built because we must have known deep down that something important to us was about to end.
But that was my life back then and, even though things are definitely different now, maybe I shouldn't be so quick to say that things have really changed. My primary hobbies and interests are different, my free time spent reading books or listening to music or exploring the city, and I use these new interests to connect with others, but that’s not much different than worrying together about basketballs, ball fours, or fourth downs. A bridge is only a reminder of how certain things should be connected, and remain so, and I don’t stop on them anymore because I know where I’m going – to weddings or wakes, to visit new houses and meet new babies. The nouns are different but the point remains the same – finding ways to be unobtrusive companions so that we can practice sharing, using the trivial to prepare for the vital, building routines and stability in each other so that we have the foundations we need when life shakes our very core to acknowledge that although everything does end, nothing important ever needs to be over.
