A Big Moment For The Cubs

Now we’ve seen everything.

Well, some of us have. The rest of you? Hope you had a good night’s sleep.

The Chicago Cubs won their first World Series since 1908 on, well, Thursday morning, beating the Cleveland Indians 8-7 in 10 innings (plus a 17-minute rain delay). They won it by coming back from a three-game deficit in the best-of-seven series and they did it after blowing a 6-3 lead in a game where manager Joe Maddon will, oddly, be revered for winning a World Series and reviled for his series of bizarre decisions (especially with his pitchers) that nearly cost the Cubs dearly. The game ended at 12:46 a.m., devouring more than four hours of a viewer’s life and destroying any chance of ongoing productivity.

Not that it wasn’t ultimately worth it.

For the Cubs, 108 years elapsed between titles. This is their third – 1907 and 1908 were the others. Theodore Roosevelt was president of the United States. Women’s voting was a social upheaval 12 years away. The Indians, who held that 3-1 lead in games and had Games 6 and 7 at home, have not won a World Series since 1948 (Harry Truman sat in the Oval Office) and in 1997 (Bill Clinton) lost a Game 7 in extra innings to the Miami Marlins.

The Cubs were the endearing icon of extended failure and near-misses, endless losers with neither skill when it was needed nor luck in dire circumstance. Many a great ballplayer – Ernie Banks, Ron Santo, Ferguson Jenkins, Billy Williams, Andre Dawson – labored on behalf of a franchise perennially bound for nowhere.

Now, a championship. In such dramatic fashion.

Too bad you missed it. Thanks to TV’s standing dictate – start the game late and end it in when the East Coast has slapped on its CPAPs and begun to snooze fitfully ahead of the next morning’s labors – we who stayed upright and attentive saw history as real people slept. You saw the inside of your eyelids, not the Cubs winning and the ensuing celebrations.

We probably envy each other.

Write your Congressman. Complain to Fox and MLB. The seeable should be seen. And find someone who has the last three innings on their DVR. You really should see it.
 
 
Post By: Larry Weisman, a longtime sportswriter for USA TODAY, blogs for Twistity.com. Follow him on Twitter @MrLarryWeisman