Canter Bridge

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Two years later, the Red Sox fan still wakes up on the odd morning late in September thinking it never happened. It was a utopian dream, the comfort of the drugged and sleeping.

But it did happen. It’s here on film. They couldn’t have made this all up and—besides—I remember it. Like it was yesterday.

The producers of this DVD didn’t have much of a World Series series to work with. The Sox swept the Cardinals in four.

The real drama was the American League Championship Series.

Still, the producers have done a remarkable job of building the context of the Curse of the Bambino, the tragedy snatched from the jaws of triumph in years that are branded into the thighs and brains of Red Sox fans—1967, 1975, 1986—the new Spring hopes that make one feel a little foolish. The mind games. The despair. The self-loathing.

It all ended in 2004.

It’s right here on film.

The names now fit comfortably beside those of Yaz and the rest of Fenway’s venerable ghosts: Schilling, Damon (still beloved in pinstripes), Pedro, Millar, Derek Lowe, Trot, Big Papi, Manny Being Manny, ‘Skip’ Francona, the undyingly heroic field captain ‘Tek’ Varitek, the man paid to steal one base (Dave Roberts). The gutsy trade of Nomar.

Then there were the demons of this passion play: All the Yankees, but particularly A-Rod, who played the part of a bizarrely emasculated Lucifer. And all the Yankees, again. And again.

Everybody else was just there that season for bit parts and background noise for Big Papi’s walkoff homers and Curt Schillings epochal bloody sock, the crux of Red Sox Nation’s unlikely redemption.

A Red Sox fan watching this DVD for the fifth time can still not suppress the goosebumps.

Where were we for this game? And that game? The true fans among us are slightly embarrassed about the fact that we remember where, a stroke of intellectual capacity that is supposed to be reserved for truly international events.

As I write this in mid-October, 2006, the Sox are at home and Detroit is facing off with Oakland for the American League Championship.

It doesn’t matter. We won. It’s right there on the DVD. Plus, the soundtrack is brilliant.

It all ends in glory after all, not ashes. Redemption.