It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over

Girlfriend, I hope that some day you have the experience of waking up in the morning and immediately thinking, “Where’s the sports page?”

That’s what happened to me on this morning. Last night, the Boston Red Sox were obviously on their way to being eliminated by a young, vigorous and well playing Tampa Rays team. It was 7 to 0 in the seventh inning, for heaven’s sake, and even The Boyfriend turned off the television in disgust. (It is sometimes better for your health if your team doesn’t make it into the playoffs. You can just relax and enjoy the games in a detached, appreciative manner instead of being bi-polar for an additional three weeks.)

Anyway, he left the game and I was out with a friend and came home about the time he checked the internet for “the final score”. There was a shout and a yell, “It’s 7-6, we gotta watch the game.” We stampeded to the couch.

And the Red Sox did it. They came from 7 runs behind and in the last three innings, scored 8 runs and earned another chance, another sweaty-heart-pounding-bipolar-episode for the fans. Coco Crisp tied it up with a 10-pitch at bat resulting in one run RBI and JD Drew hit an RBI walk off single to win the game in the bottom of the ninth. Then it was just a bunch of joyous-silly-jumping-up-and-down-puppy-like boys on the field, thrilled that they pulled off the impossible. They haven’t won the series and they are still behind two games, but one of the best parts of baseball is when the team you are rooting for pulls it off even though they should have lost.

Sports fans of all kinds know this feeling. This is not particular to baseball. But what does seem to be unique is the rapidity of how things can change. In soccer, players score one goal at a time. But in baseball, a player’s at bat can jump the score anywhere between one run to four runs in a single bat, So even when the game plods for several innings, things can change quickly. It ain’t easy. There wasn’t a Red Sox fan in Fenway at the beginning of the seventh inning that thought his or her team was going to win last night. A bunch of them headed home because it was late and they wanted to beat traffic. But suddenly there was a wave of good hitting and missed fielding that resulted in the crowd being back in the game again. And despite a gloomy first six innings, heck, here came the Red Sox coming from behind for the largest playoff comeback since 1929 (where the Phillies over came an 8-0 deficit against the Cubs.). This is what you pray for when you watch your team but never believe it will happen. Last night, it happened.

That’s what is so great about baseball. It really ain’t over ‘til it’s over. And it still ain’t over. Boston and Tampa meet again on Saturday and Tampa leads the series 3-2. But it still reminds me that baseball is a great game, filled with uneventful innings and soaring moments. And you reach for the sports page in the morning to relieve the impossibility and to understand what you really saw.