ever meet a born and bred bostonian? then you’l know that there are few fans more passionately die hard, than those of red sox nation.

sox fans are all about history. long memories of bitter defeat, legendary myths of fame and curse, deep seated rivalry which is passed down through the generations, inherited by blood and birth.

the rivalry with the yankees? well, it’s hard to understand unless you’ve lived it all your life. statistically, it makes no sense. emotionally, it’s an albatross to suffer year after year. and so we explain it through ghost stories and superstition. we rationalise it through baseball gods and fate. it’s part religion, part mental disorder, wholly defying any logic.

we are truly schizophrenic that way, being always of two minds: pure blind faith, and a sense of doom.

i admit to having been among the worst of them. i have sat stonelike, hour after hour during games, convinced that to even breathe or blink defferently would jinx my beloved team. and when my hypotheses held true, the rituals and rites became even further ingrained. and when they didn’t hold true, i chalked it up to luck or ju-ju or mysticism.

but a strange and unfamiliar belief has begun to take hold of me recently, in fact, only over the last three games. it’s as foreign to me as an alien language, or perhaps the rules of cricket.

it’s the small, but steadily growing belief that we make our own fate, the novel concept that we create our own luck, and even the shocking thought that we are as good as anyone else.

sox fans everywhere would gasp at these blasphemous words, and scream at me that I am tempting fate, much the way pedro martinez did when he scoffingly said he would drill babe ruth in the ass. (and as proof, look what happened *then*!)

but here’s the truth, in sum:

all streaks, both good and bad, must end sometime.
all games have a loser *and* a winner.
all history is past tense.

and so, with the series on the line tonight, playing one game against our hated enemies for a shot at all the marbles, i dare to believe that we can win.

not because we’ve reversed a curse – but because we are red sox nation. and we can be the heroes of our own story, if we only let ourselves.

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