Listening to the World Series this weekend, I heard
one of the announcers say that in terms of sheer emotion, it could only compare
with the 2001 Fall Classic—and that, of course, was, as much as anything, a
primal scream, from a New York painfully wounded, for the Yankees to win just
one more game, somehow, as if to blunt the still-searing pain of 9/11.
The New York Mets’ improbable push for the World Series
championship this year had a different emotional dynamic, of course—the desire
to attain a title not achieved since 1986. But I wanted to capture the moment,
and the bold, brassy exterior of the Tonic Bar in Times Square offered that opportunity, in the form of this photo, this
past Saturday.
At first, what came to mind about the ending of this
series and this season was the famous essay “The Green Fields of the Mind,” by the late baseball commissioner A.
Bartlett Giamatti:
“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your
heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it
blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon
as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You
count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of
sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight,
when you need it most, it stops.”
But as I read on, another, less well-known—but perhaps
more appropriate—thought from that same meditation summed up how I, as a Yankee
fan, felt 14 years ago, and how —God bless ‘em!—hundreds of thousands of Mets fans
have felt over the last 24 hours, watching two games slip away in extra innings: “how slight and fragile are the circumstances
that exalt one group of human beings over another.”
See you in the spring, when the “sunshine and high
skies” come alive again.
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