Therefore, I do not venture this proposition casually--especially after veteran Globe sportswriter Bob Ryan, in his column last Wednesday, expressed his disdain for ''pseudo-intellectuals" who ''spoil the fun with ludicrous over-analysis." But I increasingly believe it to be true: We lost something when the Sox won the World Series.
By what possible logic can that be true? Start with this: Any team (except maybe the Chicago Cubs) can win a World Series. The Arizona Diamondbacks, after all, won one in their fourth year of existence, and the Florida Marlins won one in their fifth year, and two in their first 12. (The Yankees, for their part, have collected World Series championships like cheap trinkets, pocketing 26 of them over the last 82 years.)
Not winning a World Series, on the other hand--and not just not winning, but flamboyantly, spectacularly, transcendently not winning--is a more impressive accomplishment. Before last year, no other team had not won like the Red Sox had not won. Even the benighted Cubs, who have not won for longer than the Red Sox have not won, haven't not won with such dramatic flair as the Sox, who seemed to find ever-more outlandish ways to not win despite having victory in hand. (The Cubs' equally but less famously benighted neighbors the White Sox, for their part, have been so quiet in their failure to win over the last 88 years that no one even notices them not winning.)
As masters of the perennial near-miss, members of Red Sox Nation may have been eternal losers--but in our predestination for failure, we had something special, a Calvinist sense that we were, in our humility and accursedness, somehow distinct from all those arrogant New Yorkers, or lazy Los Angelenos, or mild Minnesotans. Now that we've won, we've taken a step toward becoming more like everyone else, more like the Sunbelt of Arizona and Florida, where World Series championships must seem to fall from trees like overripe grapefruit.
