A game summary would be thin stuff indeed compared to this out-pouring of joy on a beautiful blue and gold New England morning in late October.[90] Usually when I go to get the papers and my 8 A.M. doughnut, the little store up the road is almost empty. This morning it was jammed, mostly with people waiting for those newspapers to come in. The majority were wearing Red Sox hats, and the latest political news was the last thing on their minds. They wanted to talk about last night’s game. They wanted to talk about the Series as a whole. They wanted to talk about the guts of Curt Schilling, pitching on his hurt ankle, and the grit of Mr. Lowe, who was supposed to spend the postseason in the bullpen and ended up securing a magickal and historickal place for himself in the record books instead, as the winner in all three postseason clinchers: Game 3 of the Division Series, Game 7 of the League Championship Series, and now Game 4 of the World Series. And while none of those waiting for the big-time morning papers—the Boston Globe, USA Today, and the New York Times—came right out and asked my grandson’s question, I could see it in their eyes, and I know they could see it in mine: Is this a dream, or are we living real life?

It’s real life. If there was a curse (other than a sportswriter’s brilliant MacGuffin for selling books, amplified in the media echo chamber until even otherwise rational people started to half-believe it), it was the undeniable fact that the Red Sox hadn’t won a World Series since 1918, and all the baggage that fact brought with it for the team’s long-suffering fans.

The Yankees and their fans have always been the heaviest of that baggage, of course. Yankee rooters were never shy about reminding Red Sox partisans that they were supporting lifetime losers. There was also the undeniable fact that in recent years the Yankee ownership—comfy and complacent in their much bigger ballpark and camped just downstream from a waterfall of fan cash—had been able to outspend the Red Sox ownership, sometimes at a rate of two dollars to one. There was the constant patronization of the New York press (the Times, for instance, chuckling in its indulgently intelligent way over the A-Rod deal, and concluding that the Yankees were still showing the Red Sox how to win, even in the off-season), the jokes and the gibes.

The ball through Bill Buckner’s legs in 1986 was horrible, of course, but now Buckner can be forgiven.

What’s better is that now the Bucky Dent home run, the Aaron Boone home run and the monotonous chants of Who’s your Daddy? can be forgotten. Laughed off, even. On the whole, I would have to say that while to forgive is human, to forget is freakin’ divine.