Bill Simmons, the Boston Sports Guy, pulls off the difficult job of relating the Fenway experience to both die-hard fans and perplexed outsiders:
For two straight days, I watched my beloved Red Sox stave off elimination against the Yanks, needing 26 innings over 27 hours to stay alive for Game 6 in New York. These weren't just baseball games. They were life experiences. They broke you down in sections. They made you question God, the meaning of life, whether sports should possibly mean this much. On Sunday night, I stewed in my seat vowing never to raise my kids as Sox fans. On Monday night, I skipped out of Fenway wondering if any other team could possibly mean this much to a group of people.
...Game 4 ended a little after 1:30 a.m. Fifteen hours later, I was sitting in my same seats in section 116 with my father, glancing around and wondering if we ever actually left. Apparently we did. There was only one major difference between the two nights: in Game 4, the fans were waiting for the Yankees to win the game. In Game 5, the fans were waiting for the Red Sox to come through. Now everyone in New England is pinning their hopes to the greatest comeback in baseball history. It happens that fast.
Emphases mine. Some of the best writing on the Red Sox is coming up at Surviving Grady. Start at the bottom and work your way up from the despair of the early Yankees drubbings, to the whiff of respectability when we won one, to the glimmer of hope Tuesday morning. Now? Chest-thumping and a dare to dream. On the ankle-sutured heroics of Curt Shilling, Red says:
The absolute fantastic-ness of this event is impossible to overstate. Two days ago, he was a gimp. A horrific footnote [pardon the pun] to the 2004 season. A million dollar horse that went tits-up when we needed him most.
But then the balls took over. And he was literally a one-legged guy at an ass-kicking contest. And his cleat did find ample ass to strike. And he turned in a one-run-over-seven-innings performance with blood soaking through his socks and sweat coating his back.
It was simply the gutsiest thing MLB has witnessed all year.
On the flipside, we had A-Rod resorting to schoolboy tactics, blatantly knocking the ball from Arroyo's glove on a close play at first, then whining incessantly when he was called out for it.
Maybe God's finally paying attention. Maybe he sees what's up.
Yeah, a little boisterous, but everyone who's up and blogging about this right now is drunk on something. Read the comments to those posts, as well, because the fans are writing poetry.