New England and a sprawling Nation of fans can finally exhale. The Red Sox are world champs. No more Curse of the Bambino. No more taunts of ``1918.'' The suffering souls of Bill Buckner, Grady Little, Mike Torrez, Johnny Pesky, Denny Galehouse, and the rest are released from Boston Baseball's Hall of Pain.
The Red Sox are champions because they engineered the greatest comeback in baseball history when they won four straight games against the hated Yankees in the American League Championship Series. It was a baseball epic, an event for the ages that put the Red Sox into a World Series that was profoundly anti-climactic.
En route to eight consecutive postseason wins, the Sons of Tito Francona simply destroyed a Cardinal team that won a major league-high 105 games in 2004. The Sox did not trail for a single inning of the four-game sweep. No Cardinal pitcher lasted more than six innings and St. Louis's vaunted row of sluggers was smothered by the likes of Curt Schilling, Pedro Martinez, closer Keith Foulke, and Lowe.
In the finale, a game played under a full moon/lunar eclipse on the date of Boston's Game 7 loss in the excruciating 1986 World Series, Johnny Damon led off with a home run and the Sox were never threatened. Trot Nixon added a pair of runs with a bases-loaded double in the third. Lowe mowed down the Cardinals for seven, then let relievers Bronson Arroyo, Alan Embree, and Keith Foulke finish the job. It ended at 11:41 EDT when Edgar Renteria hit a grounder back to Foulke.
Statues - to be placed near those of Samuel Adams and James Michael Curley, are already on order for Messrs. Schilling, Martinez, Lowe, Foulke, Damon, Manny Ramirez (Series MVP), David Ortiz, Mark Bellhon, Jason Varitek, Orlando Cabrera and the rest of members of the 2004 Red Sox. They did something that had not been done in 86 years.
So now it's time to toast to Ted Williams, Tom Yawkey, Sherm Feller, Dick O'Connell, Haywood Sullivan, Joe Cronin, Eddie Collins, Tony Conigliaro, Ned Martin, Helen Robinson, Jack Rogers, and thousands of others who toiled for the team, but died before seeing their Sox win a World Series.
