The three game losing streak is over. Hard to imagine a worse time to uncork a losing streak, but at least it’s done now. Bill Livingston has a good column today, saying, among other things….
When Cleveland gets around to throwing pity parties, which it does at the drop of a fly ball in the sun, this was going to be a September the city might never forget.
Pity parties aside, this week has revealed the stark inner beast that lives inside every Cleveland sports fan. How many times this week have you heard normally sane people start saying things like “The Drive”, “The Shot”, “Jose Mesa”? There’s a vocabulary of woe that Clevelanders can recite almost as an involuntary reaction. Might be knee jerk, but I don’t think that’s the right word.
However you describe it, the phenomenon of Cleveland sports agony unites us. I found myself talking to a complete strange in a bar last night about this stuff. Never would have talked to him otherwise. There’s something about our Cleveland sports experience that really makes such journeys almost a civic engagement exercise. We don’t really want to go there, because it hurts…a lot…but when we do go there, we know EXACTLY the moment that journey begins, and we all sort of look around to find anyone else who senses it too. Anyone at all.
Well, it’s time to breathe again folks. The Indians are still alive, very much so, and even if they don’t make it, we’ll have another story to tell, another invisible connection to every other Clevelander that brings us together.
