If a neighborhood could sink under the weight of decades and decades of crushed baseball dreams, it happened in Chicago Wednesday night as the Cubs were again knocked out of World Series contention.
This was supposed to be the year that baseball’s ‘loveable losers’ ended the longest title drought in North American sports history: a whopping 107 years.
They’d already beaten baseball’s statistically ‘best’ team — the St. Louis Cardinals — in the first round of the playoffs, after a wildcard game victory over the Pittsburg Pirates sealed their first post-season win in 12 years.
That is not to mention the fact that the movie “Back to the Future” predicted the Cubs would win in 2015. And Thursday — October 21 — was the day that Marty McFly’s DeLorean landed him in front of that implausible holographic billboard “Cubs Win World.”
But the Cubs failed. Their loss Wednesday night made it 4-0 for the New York Mets in the best of seven series in the National League Championship.
If Hollywood had been writing the script, the Cubs would have dug in after losing the first three games against the Mets, pulled off an underdog, come-from-behind win on Wednesday night and then swept to a glorious, curse-breaking World Series victory.
It happened to the Boston Red Sox in 2004: a team also weighed down by a curse, and a weightier one at that.
The Red Sox were saddled with the “curse of the Bambino” after selling Babe Ruth to arch-rivals the New York Yankees a year after he helped them win the 1918 series. And it only took them 84 years to win another.
The Cub’s “curse of the Billy Goat” is much less deserved: it was lobbed by an irate tavern owner after he tried to bring a pet goat into Wrigley Field during Game Four of the 1945 World Series.
– “Go Cubs! Go!” –
“107 years we’ve been waiting. Figured maybe this was going to be the year,” David Dakota said as he held his 22-month-old son Blake in front of a gate that offers a view of the play at Wrigley Field.
“Hoping for a victory here, but it’s not looking so good,” Dakota said during the bottom of the third inning.
Blake hadn’t picked up on his father’s disappointment yet as he piped out adorably lispy “Go-Cubs-Go” chants. His wide eyes drank in the excitement of bright lights and busy streets outside one of the last stadiums in the United States still nestled in a neighborhood, rather than surrounded by a sea of concrete parking lots.
He didn’t know that the bars across the street were usually a lot more packed. Or notice that many of the people left inside had already stopped paying attention to the big screen TVs.
Some of the team’s most faithful fans kept believing they had a shot long after the Cubs gave up four runs in the first inning and two more in the second.
– ‘There’s always next year’ –
Bartender Diane Harder, 63, grew up just a few blocks from the team’s storied stadium and loves the Cubs so much she tattooed their logo on her shoulder.
“They’re down, but we’ve got a lot of time, we can do it, absolutely,” Harder told AFP after slipping away from her costly playoff seat for a smoke break during the sixth inning when the Cubs were down 6-1.
Cheers and chants of ‘Go Cubs Go’ poured out of Wrigley as she smoked, but so did plenty more fans who weren’t heading back in.
Soon, that trickle of dejection turned into a flood.
“Everyone’s heart gave out. It was kinda terrible,” said Nicko Makropoulos, 22, who couldn’t bear to wait it out until the bitter end. “I thought for sure we were going to win.”
Jill Staunton, 33, and her father left their costly seats during the eighth inning when the Cubs were down 8-3. They didn’t want to have to see the Mets celebrate a playoff victory underneath Wrigley’s ivy-covered walls.
“True Cubs fans don’t get too upset, they just hold out hope,” she said with a sigh. “There’s always next year.”