THE wait was excruciating. Such are the burdens of Game 7. Such are the payoffs of Game 7. You spend so much time as a baseball fan wading through the minutiae of a baseball season, staying up late to catch games on the coast, grinding along with your team during losing streaks, gliding with them during winning streaks.
In April, when the season is all in front of you, when October is but a distant abstraction, you dream of Game 7. You salivate at the prospect of what Game 7 would be like. That’s what baseball is all about, you say. That’s what everyone wants. Game 7 in October. Damn right.
Then you get one. And it involves your team.
And it is hell. It is excruciating. It is hour after hour of 500-minute hours. It’s calling your friends and begging them for reassurance. It’s talking yourself into believing that your team has no shot, absolutely no shot at losing Game 7. Followed five minutes later by the depressing reality that your team has no shot, absolutely no shot, at winning Game 7.
Last year, I told myself there was never going to be a worse day than the day the Red Sox and the Yankees played Game 7,” a marketing executive named Dennis Johanson was saying yesterday afternoon. He is a Red Sox fan, a stranger in a strange land for the second straight year, living on the Upper West Side.
Afterward, it wasn’t even that I was depressed. It was that I was depleted. Exausted. Absolutely drained beyond belief. I couldn’t sleep between Games 6 and 7. I was so convinced we were going to win. And then . . .”
He laughed a difficult laugh.
And now,” he said yesterday, we get to do it all again. My heart can’t take this.”
Fred Goldstein understands. He is a Yankee fan, raised in Brooklyn now living in Newton, Mass., and calls himself, ever playfully, the embedded Yankee fan.” He was able to enjoy last year’s Game 7 and its aftermath quite easily.
But even that was only barely worth it,” Goldstein said. First, the wait before the game. I was useless at work. I was useless with my wife and my kids when I got home. And during the game? I’m a basket case. Winning Game 7 that way is a great feeling as a sports fan, the best. But my wife ultimately had to ask me, absolutely serious: ‘Is it worth it, feeling this way?’ I wasn’t sure how to respond to that. I’m still not. And yet here we are, all over again.”
Yesterday was a sensory adventure in New York City, in New Jersey, certainly all across Connecticut, where the boundaries of Yankees and Red Sox meet and blur right around the Hartford city line.
If you turned on the television, you could find a replay of the ’78 Yankee-Red Sox playoff game on two different channels. You could see replays of countless Red Sox-Yankees games over the years. If you turned on the radio, you could hear dozens of New York accents fretting over their allegedly invincible team. And dozens of Boston accents confidently predicting the end to a super-sized jinx.
If you sat for lunch at restaurant tables all across the city, you heard snippets of the same conversation. Rare is the time when you get so many people so locked into the same thing, so tuned into the same wavelength. But a Game 7 gets you there. A Game 7 gets you into so many places, feeling so many emotions.
A few years ago, when Larry Robinson was coaching the Devils, his team was facing a Game 7 showdown with the Flyers, for the right to play for the Stanley Cup. And Robinson, a veteran of many Game 7s in his playing days, summed it up perfectly.
Game 7 makes you either shine or throw up,” he said.
He was talking about athletes. But he could have been talking about the fans, too.