Next year, next year, next year ...
The two words are fading as I began this column Thursday morning. They are a dim echo down Waveland, a familiar whisper in the North Side's weary bars, the roar of a drunk as his friends try to shove him into a cab.
"Lovable losers," they call us, although just who loves us besides us isn't quite clear. Lovable in an "aw-shucks" kind of way, I guess. Loved in the way that Wiley E. Coyote might be as the pennant yells a defiant "beep-beep!" and zips away in a puff of smoke, leaving us to give the camera one last blank stare before dropping over a cliff.
That is the question, then: "Whether 'tis truly nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune." Or, in our case, whether 'tis nobler to suffer in October than our usual choke in mid-April. They're the two cardinal rules of baseball: Good pitching always beats good hitting, and the Cubs always beat themselves.
The lovable losers. The curse of the billy goat. Completely useless by September.
Next year. Was 2003 really all that different?
The reins were handed to Dusty Baker ("In Dusty We Trusty," read the signs in Wrigley's bleachers), who led the team to its first division championship since 1989 ("It's Dustiny!"). We had some terrific new offensive players ("Thank You Pittsburgh!") and one of the best young pitching staffs in the major leagues ("Winning is a Prior-ity!" and "We've Got Wood").
And the Cubbies rallied like never before. We waited, breath held, for the other shoe to drop.
It never did.
We won, and won, and won and then suddenly, it was September. The month wore on. The wins racked up.
If we wanted the division championship, we would have to beat Pittsburgh twice to overtake Houston in the rankings. How were we supposed to beat Houston? We would never beat Houston.
But we beat Houston, and then we had to face Atlanta. Atlanta? Were they kidding? We may have managed to beat Houston, but never Atlanta.
We beat Atlanta. And then there were the Marlins. Well, they weren't as bad as Atlanta, right? Maybe we could play them right, and we went 3-1 in the series. The pulse of Cub Nation began to race.
But then it sputtered to a stop. Eight runs in the eighth of Game 6, a cat-and-mouse chase that ended at just the wrong moment in Game 7.
"Next year." You can call it a curse if you like. You can blame it on the will of the gods, the phase of the moon, the way the wind blew in Wrigley or that one poor guy who didn't see Moises Alou chasing the foul ball he reached for (and you wouldn't have either).
Personally, I'm a little tired of hearing about the goat thing. I want to know who this angry bar owner was and why his angry proclamation is any stronger than the 50,000 voices shrieking Kerry Wood's name Wednesday night. I'd probably believe it if it made a lick of sense, like if the president, George Steinbrenner or someone had said it. But a guy who owns a bar in Chicago? And his goat versus the roaring legions in the Friendly Confines? Please.
In the space of one offseason, the lovable losers became the National League Central Division champions. We may not have beat every team in the game, but we beat a whole lot of them. And we put the fear of God in the hearts of those we didn't beat.
In the space of one offseason, the team everyone sent in their backups to play became the team nobody wanted to face.
In the space of one offseason, everything changed.
And now? Another offseason. Last year, we made the jump from collapsing to contending in five months. The space between the LCS and the championship is a far smaller gap. In Dusty we still "trusty," winning is still our "Prior-ity," and yes, we've still got Wood. But above all else, we still have our dreams.
Next year, we're going all the way. And I, for one, can't wait.
