A whole new world
No more Cubbies. I suppose it's now Cubz. Or Kubz. Something millennial and mean, something tough, something a winner can strut.
From the brink to the peak, from dismissal to glorious, doing it the hard way, as if the Cubs have ever done it any other.
And so they stand alone, for now, maybe for a while, a promise made and a promise kept. Cue the music. Play the song. Wave the flag. Exhale.
Measure tomorrow and it can never match today. No game can match the one that killed all curses, one that tormented as much as it exalted, as full of fools as heroes, just as the Cubs always have been.
A familiar dread came when Joe Maddon excused the best pitcher of the night for no reason other than he could, when the gods of glory seemed about to slap the Cubs around again, then heaven took a pause to think things over, wept a little and decided, enough is enough.
This was, after all, baseball's two greatest disappointments colliding. Imagine the Andrea Doria and Edmund Fitzgerald on a blind date.
Here, Cleveland, the longest losing streak in baseball is yours, passed along with the useless wish that it brings as much sweet agony and chronic faith to you as it has to the Cubs.
You search the bin of popular culture to find the words for what this all means, and you are torn between the sappy Celine Dion lyric about a new day — “waiting for so long for a miracle to come” — and the bitter blurt from Robert Stack in “Airplane”: “He's in charge. He's the boss, head man, top dog, big cheese, head honcho.”
You hear the excited call from Al Michaels long ago, “Do you believe in miracles?” but, after all, anything that takes 108 years to realize is not a miracle at all, even for wine.
“Cubs win! Cubs win!” is somehow not enough, even though the cry has replaced surprise with satisfaction.
Yet, what you do know is that the Cubs are not what they were. They can be grateful and defiant at the same time, sentimental and belligerent. It is all fresh and will take time sorting out.
This new world is not just brave but audacious, demanding more of the same even before the happy echoes in the Wrigleyville bars and along the concrete canyons of the city have turned to murmurs.
How insufferable did the Red Sox become after ending their long curse? And what about the Giants, the nearest thing to a dynasty in recent baseball? Snoot balls, the lot of them, in love with their own bobbleheads.
This happens in all sports. Success delayed is success exploited. The urge to get even for past suffering changes kindness into demands for retribution.
Maybe Papa Smurf Maddon will not let it happen, maybe Rizzo and Bryant and Russell and Baez and the rest will forgo human jealousy, not resent how underpaid they have been to do this. Maybe Theo Epstein will not be affected by the din of praise and each happy Ricketts will not lose touch with the devotion that was piled high before they ever got here.
All those classic black-and-white stills of Tinker and Evers and Chance in their numberless uniforms, joyful Ernie Banks holding up two fingers, Leon Durham fishing for the baseball and Moises Alou cursing a kind young fan in headphones — all of it gets thrown in with the same laundry.
The great slate of Cubs Curses has been wiped and washed, blank now of all those scribbles honestly drawn by time and disappointment. The world of the Cubs is much neater now but a whole lot less interesting.
The special place the Cubs held in the national heart, the enduring metaphor for worthy failure, the reach always lacking the grasp, is now no more. Where will we find another?
The demand is for all to feel good about this, all this for generations gone and growing, when, please recall, something similar happened to Kansas City just last year and it was worth a shrug and a yawn.
Expectation of winning is a greater burden than expectation of losing. The Cubs will just have to live with that.
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