"And So It Happened"

I sat there in my Manhattan apartment, watching the parade with great pleasure. In some ways, not altogether surprising, Manny Ramirez was the hero of the parade, MVP on a team that did not have an MVP (unless it was that famous and extremely popular and ever-versatile first baseman-DH-left fielder Manny Ortiz). In the parade, Manny was holding up a sign making fun of Derek Jeter, Jeter the golfer, and on this day everyone loved both the holder and the sign. How hard it has been all these years to mock Jeter, the otherwise unmockable. It was the best sign in the parade - and Manny had it. Manny, of course, reflected the season: Manny the unwanted at the beginning, Manny the MVP at the end. Again, that is not so surprising: When I think of him, I think of him as a double-edged Manny, as in Live-by-the-Manny, Die-by-the-Manny.

That was a quality brought home most painfully in the first game of the World Series, when in a space of two innings he got a critical hit, applauded himself so enthusiastically that he did not turn it into a double, and then belatedly tried for second. Only Cardinal fielding even worse than his base running kept him from being thrown out. That in turn was followed by two unforgivable fielding errors in two innings. But he kept getting hits and he kept on being Manny, and his lapses, such as they are, were forgiven; to love Manny is to forgive the unforgivable. In the end we all loved him and his Mannyisms; and he, wonderfully happy on the day of the celebration, was the star of the parade.

Is this the beginning of a great and most unlikely cultural accommodation between player and fan base, the Mannyization of New England, or will it be (a bit less likely) the New Englandization of Manny? Will it last a long time? How deep goes this love affair? Stay tuned.

The great curse of the gods of baseball is gone. With all respect to my great pal Dan Shaughnessy, I never thought it was a curse. Not even a milder hex. A shadow maybe, but not that of the Babe. The shadow of Willie Mays, when the Sox did not sign him back in 1949 when they had first shot at the then-18-year-old Mays because he played in Alabama for the Birmingham Black Barons in the park of the Birmingham (white) Barons, a Sox farm club, and they had been tipped by the (white) Barons owner to Mays's greatness. The Sox' talented regional scout George Digby told me that he was possibly the best player he had ever scouted, but the Red Sox management wanted no part of him.

A shadow like that can last a long time, and the damage it can do is immense, especially at a time when the great new talent bank was first black, and then black and Hispanic.

But I thought it was a good - and on occasion a great - team, a franchise that all too often had an ownership that was never quite as good as it should have been, and as such the team came up just a bit short. The teams were almost always competitive and fun to watch, and those great World Series expeditions are worth pondering: four trips, 1946, 1967, 1975, and 1986, 28 games played, further than that you cannot push it. Teams that are cursed do not go to seven games in October. Teams that are cursed disappear in October.

Everything about them was attractive: the ballpark with its sense of living history; the deeply knowledgeable fans, singularly loyal if a bit wary; the sportswriters, who were, for a long time, possibly the best in the country. Thus there might be a shortfall in pitching, but there would never be a shortfall in critics. And, of course, the harsh winter, so much time to talk about so little else. All these things mean that they matter.

In the past, the ownership tended to come up just a bit short, usually in pitching. In 1949, in that extraordinary pennant race that went down to the last game of the season, it was Raschi, Reynolds, and Lopat for New York, soon to be joined by Whitey Ford (and with, of course, Joe Page, the rare great reliever of that era), against Parnell and Kinder. That has been true right up to this season, when it has become ever clearer that George Steinbrenner, his team less and less a product of his farm system, has involuntarily come up with a new philosophy of putting together a pitching staff: Buy old, and buy high. In recent years the teams have been almost exactly even, with the Yankees commanding a slight edge in starting pitching and having the one player who was critical to the franchise's success, Mariano Rivera.

The new Red Sox ownership seems to be the smartest the city has ever had: John Henry may not be from New England, but he strikes me as someone who is acutely aware that in baseball terms he owns one of the jewels in the crown, and that though it is a private company, the Red Sox are, in all real ways, public property, that his accountability, in this case an almost mystical thing, is to something larger than baseball, to an institution that, as much as anything, encompasses an entire region and, more than anything, binds it together.

As such, the owners responded to last year's shortfall in precisely the ways that their predecessors rarely did. They added a desperately needed starter in Curt Schilling; they junked the bizarre closer-by-committee and got Keith Foulke as their closer. They were in a difficult position on the Nomar front, but they handled a complex and painful situation with considerable skill.

And so it happened. They finally won. And they won in a marvelous way: Three down to the Yankees, they then went on to win eight in a row against two of the best teams in baseball. It was like putting an exclamation point at the end of the last sentence about the season. And that brings us to the final, haunting question. Will success spoil Red Sox Nation? Will the magic be gone? Was the real bond a sure sense of eventual failure?

I don't think so. As someone who has traveled the country and has heard a great many confessions from fans all over the map, stories of love and disappointment, but above all stories of faith, I think it is important that there are two quite separate parts of Red Sox Nation: There are the Category One, faith-based people, the home-grown fans, the children of New England, the most rooted of fans, no matter where they live today, whose loyalties go back generations weaned on stories of the young Ted and the aging Jimmie Foxx and Lefty Grove (fans for whom Yaz, at 65, remains something of a newcomer); and there are the Category Two fans, the people out there who root for the Red Sox because they are the main obstacle to the success of the dreaded Yankees. I should point out that on occasion Category Two fans become Category One fans, but the process is by no means automatic.

I have no doubt of the durability of the Category One fans. That's because it's in the DNA, much, much deeper than with most fan bases, built on the resonance of the game in the region and an unusual - living - connection to the past, on memories passed on lovingly, generation to generation. I never thought these fans rooted to be disappointed. Instead, they rooted in a very personal way, as if by proxy for those who had gone before them in their own families, and who had always been disappointed. Theirs was a special connection, one of enduring love mixed with a profound foreboding.

And the pleasure of it all, the sweetness of this particular fall, will that last as well? That, of course, is a very different question. It's a lovely feeling right now, but things like this do not last a long time.

If you need a victory by your favorite sports team to give you some kind of enduring emotional upgrade, then you are, I suspect, in real trouble. It's a pleasant fix, this winning, and in this case it's long overdue and a lot better than losing. But the American League East is a competitive, expensive battleground, and no one has enough pitching and everyone's pitchers are too old. This is the time for happiness, for an amnesty on Red Sox villains of the past, a time to forget all the things that went wrong at all the last moments, and to look forward to the coming season. All good things happen in the spring, we all know that, and besides, Bronson Arroyo looks as if he's about ready to break out as a big-time major-league pitcher.

Play it (again), Theo.

Lifelong baseball fan David Halberstam is the author of many books, including Summer of '49, The Teammates, and Playing for Keeps.