it's time to play some baseball

sentimentality has so often been the unperceived enemy of this team and the fans who unwittingly embrace it -- in december and in march and in june.

it's been the source of a thousand excuses, a thousand faults, a thousand failures for this ballclub that has done nothing so well since the second world war as exploit the siren song of baseball fantasies past as a shallow and derivative substitute for baseball reality present.

but there's also simply no denying that, once they're in the playoffs -- in october -- every cub fan is not only right but bound to survey what has happened, and to hope for what might finally happen. what is in ordinary times mere maudlin escapism can, in extraordinary moments and on the precipice of true achievement, become something quite different. what has been dissipative can suddenly lend focus. what has been destabilizing can now act as ballast. what has divided and scattered can collect and unite.

chuck over at ivy chat presents this bit of art from the hand of vin scully that strikes now with resonance where just weeks ago it could so easily have echoed hollow. now is the time -- that rare time -- to take a moment to immerse yourself in the current of emotion and gain from it a deeper understanding of what is happening that no analysis can provide.

it's times like these that my weaker aspects most pity the people who spend their every day, season after season, trying to drown themselves in sentimentality and emotionalism through this team. a part of me is inclined to wonder if they can at all appreciate the truly exquisite quality of this moment, or if it is just another bigger hit from the same old pipe lost and diluted among so many others.

and yet my better nature realizes that it somehow hardly matters -- what has divided and scattered now collects and unites.

it's time to play some october baseball for all cub fans everywhere, all of us harboring honest hope for what might finally be happening -- the fulfillment of lifetimes of anticipation, to for once see a final act not of tragedy but of triumph.