So it all comes down to this…

One of my first memories of being a Red Sox fan was sitting the bleachers wondering why Fenway was so quiet so early. Lenny Dykstra had just taken Oil Can Boyd’s first pitch into the right field seats. I was 2 months removed from my sixth birthday.

A few days later, I cried because the adults cried. I didn’t know why for a year or two. I didn’t have an appreciation of why it was important until October 2004.

We’re now 11 months removed from the Red Sox winning the World Series. Something that I still call one of the top five moments of my life, which is now a quarter-century long, and I know that Sully and Mullet are marginally older than I, would probably rank it up there as well. This is an event that was supposed to soften us, maybe remove some of our self-indulgent resolve that united us into the cliché of Red Sox Nation. As a collective, we were supposed to fade back into the baseball universe as nothing special, just people that love a baseball team.

If this is true, why am I so pissed off at the team all the time?

This is a new feeling for me. I’ve had a few outbursts in the past, usually as a guttural response of a season gone awry be it from something off the bat of an Aaron Boone or a Tony Pena, or wondering why Pedro is still in the game. Never have I been watching a run-of-the-mill regular season game and felt actual anger reaching to the top of my throat like I have this year.

I would like to know why. My life isn’t full of many emotional swings like this. I try hard to be even-keel with everything. In non-baseball pursuits, I honestly can’t remember the last time I so much as rose my voice. Yet this year, a year after we were supposed to become lobotomized versions of our former self (they even let you keep the brain!), I’ve become someone who throws pillows and swears a lot.

Since I was six years old, I’ve waited with baited breath for the very moment that I experienced in Charlie O’s on October 27, 2004. Whereas a victory was supposed to be like a shot of emotional heroin, I’m popping greenies to keep up. I’m angry because this team should be better. I’m angry because they could better.

I’m angry because they aren’t better.

This weekend, I’m sure that I will be dropping F-bombs, and pacing where as before I watched with a kind of calm amusement. Now that I’ve seen a ring, I want to see more. What’s more is that I never want to not be able to look up and see “World Champion Boston Red Sox” in the sky.

For long time readers, I haven’t written much this year because I don’t think I could keep my emotion out of it enough. I’m trying to rehabilitate myself back into the person that just loved baseball rather than be consumed with the right result. I’m sure there are a few people out there that can relate to me. I would guess there is more that actually feel the opposite. Then there are some who have no change. To wrap it all up…

We’re Red Sox fans. We’re human. Now kick the Yankees’ ass and ease my pain.