This column originally ran in The Standard-Times on Nov. 6, 2016.

By Nick Tavares
Pʀᴇsᴇɴᴛ Tᴇɴsᴇ

After the longest drought in North American sports came to an end, I was in a weird spot in my living room.

Through a combination of pacing, sitting and standing, I’d wound up by my desk in the corner, watching as Mike Montgomery came into the 10th inning of Game 7 of the World Series. The Cleveland Indians had the potential winning run at the plate with two outs, and the Cubs were trying to put them away once again.

I could run through the full play-by-play of every absurd twist and turn of that game. But that last out was particularly ridiculous — a dribbler from Michael Martinez’s bat that required Kris Bryant crashing in from third base, scooping and whipping across his body to an admittedly nervous Anthony Rizzo at first base.

As soon as that out was signaled, Rizzo threw his arms in the air, the Cubs started streaming out of the dugout, the throngs outside Wrigley Field hundreds of miles away erupted into chaos and I slumped out of my rolling desk chair onto one of the arms of my couch.

I was exhausted, drained and bewildered, and I don’t even claim either of these teams as “my” team. Immediately, the realization of what a Cubs championship truly meant was overpowering.

From that insane series through that even-more frantic finish came the afterglow. That’s where the images of strangers hugging each other begin to pick up significance. It builds when the videos of grown men and women in their 80s and 90s crying and cheering start to truly build up. The bell curve reaches a peak when the millions line the streets of the city to pay tribute to the first Cubs team to reach Olympus since Teddy Roosevelt was president.

There remains the other side. Cleveland will have to wait into a 69th year for its World Series vindication, at the very least, despite throwing everything they could at the Cubs. The Indians were down two top starters for most of the playoffs and ran their three primary bullpen arms as far as they could. To come out on the wrong end of such a brutal game is agonizing.

In the aftermath, Terry Francona gave Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci a master’s class on how a manager should handle the agony of defeat. He pushed every button and pulled every string as well as he could, and he got his team within a hair of a championship. The hurt and pride and nobility were apparent in his face and his words.

In the meantime, the glimmer remains on the baseball world. It took more than a century to simmer and it exploded in an emotional burst that even reached fans who haven’t lived and died with the Cubs. That feeling comes courtesy of those who did, those who have toughed through the close calls of Ernie Banks and Ron Santo, Ryne Sandberg and Andre Dawson, Kerry Wood and Mark Prior. There were all those seasons in between where the team couldn’t even sniff the top of their division.

And there was ugliness, when the fans turned on a poor fan who was in the wrong seat at the wrong time, morphing him into a pariah and forcing him away from a park he’d previously loved. It’s not all sunshine, and there were dark paths on the road to a championship.

Through those seasons, good and bad, there were trips to Wrigley Field and stories from parents and grandparents. The slow, deliberate process of letting a team, its players and its fans seep into the fabric of the culture takes hold. It starts in the North Side of Chicago and it trickles out from there until the Cubs become one of the true national teams.

When a team like that finally breaks through, it’s overwhelming. We can be happy for the players and the front office and all the fans who have stubbornly stayed on this ride for so long. We can appreciate just how hard it was to get there, and how hard Cleveland made them work for it.

At its purest, this is what sports can provide. For a few days, it lives beyond negativity and cynicism.

We can sit in awe and appreciate that we got to be here to see it, when so many didn’t have the same luck. It’s a weird spot, for sure.

Nick Tavares' column appears Sundays in The Standard-Times and at SouthCoastToday.com. He can be reached at nick@nicktavares.com