Rangers got socked in Series

If you’re like us, you’ll never really recover. You’ll be reciting the play-by-play of the epic failure for decades to come. We’re still debating whether Johnny Pesky held the ball too long on a relay throw in 1946. The autopsy on Red Sox-Mets Game 6, ’86, is never complete. There is always new information and new evidence to accompany the old pain.

And now you know. You know what it was like for us for all those years.

“We have become Boston here,’’ says Fort Worth Star-Telegram columnist and ESPN-Dallas talk show host Randy Galloway. “I’m very proud. It’s easy to celebrate winning a World Series, but the despair and disgust that comes with this … it means now we’re a real baseball town.’’

Amen to that. Welcome to the world we knew for so many decades, the world we’ve come to know again over the last few months.

Galloway has been covering the Rangers since they moved from Washington to Texas in 1972. He was the original Rangers beat reporter and proudly says, “I’m the only living human being who has been to every Ranger spring training.’’

I was surprised but heartened to hear that the Rangers and their fans are taking this so badly. I figured football-crazed Texans would have moved on to the Cowboys and that beatdown in Philadelphia Sunday night.

But no.

“I’ve never seen the city this despondent about anything,’’ says Galloway. “I got an e-mail from a guy who has a medical supply company with 100 employees and he said that outside of 9/11, last Friday was the worst production day in 30 years. People are shocked.

“This is a knockdown hangover. When I flew back from St. Louis after Game 7, the plane was full of Ranger fans and it was like they were coming from a funeral.’’

In case you missed it, the Rangers last week joined the 1986 Sox as the only teams to lose a World Series after coming within one out (one strike away in both cases) of winning the championship. The Sox were working on a 68-year drought when it happened at Shea Stadium in 1986. The Rangers, born as the Washington Senators in 1961, never have won the Fall Classic.