So now the St. Louis deficit is 0-3. One would like to say that lightning cannot strike twice on the same patch of ground, and certainly not so soon, but in truth, one cannot say that. Especially not if one happens to have been a Red Sox fan for the last fifty years and has had the cup snatched away from his lips so many times just before that first deep and satisfying drink.

I don’t think I’ve ever been so aware of the limitations of this narrative’s necessary diary form until today. You sitting there with the finished book in your hand are like an astronaut who can see the entire shape of the earth: where every sea ends and every coastline begins again. I just go sailing along from day to day, hoping to avoid the storms and writing in this log when seas are calm. And now I think I can smell land up ahead. I hope I’m not jinxing things by saying that, but I really think I can. Not just any land, either, but the sweet Promised Land I’ve been dreaming of ever since my Uncle Oren bought me my first Red Sox cap and stuck it on my head in the summer of 1954. “There, Stevie,” he said, blowing the scent of Narragansett beer into the face of the big-eyed seven-year-old looking up at him. “They ain’t much, but they’re the best we got.”

Now, fifty long years later, they’re on the verge of being the best of all. One more game and we can put all this curse stuff, all this Babe stuff, all this 1918 stuff, behind us.

Please, baseball gods, just one more game.

SK: Ah, but I begin to smell exotic spices and strange nerds… er, nards… could these be the scents of the Promised Land? I can only hope they are not scents sent by false sirens on hidden stones beyond a mirage of yon beckoning shore…

But I digress.

We rocked tonight, dude.

SO: It’s good to be up 3-0 instead of down 0-3, but the job’s the same: win the game we’re playing. The guys have to stay on top of it.

SK: You must have been eating the postgame spread with Tito. :-)

October 27th/World Series Game 4

It’s Trudy’s and my twentieth anniversary today. We were supposed to be in Chicago last weekend, eating at Charlie Trotter’s and the Billy Goat Tavern (the honest-to-God home of the Cubs’ curse as well as the chee-burger, chee-burger skit from SNL), but those plans dissolved in the face of Games 1 and 2. Tonight, at Trudy’s insistence, I call and cancel our long-standing dinner reservations at the best restaurant in town. I don’t tell the maitre d’ why. “Enjoy the game,” he says.