We Can’t Go Through This Again

Some superior sportswriting this morning
in the Globe, about the upcoming baseball jihad between Boston and New
York. Please, can this be happening again? We haven’t gotten over last
year yet…First, by Dan
Shaughnessey:

And so one year after they jousted to
the (Sox’s) finish in the Bronx last
October
—
in an
epic
seventh
game that
appeared to take the clash to its zenith — they go at it again tonight
on the same hallowed soil that has haunted the Red Sox and their desperate
fans for so many years.

After a winter of cutthroat backroom moves by both front offices, 162
regular-season games (including 19 vs. each other, which inspired two
bench-clearing incidents),
and first-round victories in their respective Division Series, the Sox
and Yankees tonight play the first game in the best-of-seven American
League Championship Series for the right to represent the AL in the
World Series.

and also by Brian McGrory:

Novelist John Cheever once famously said, ”All literary
men are Red Sox fans," and the series that begins tonight at
Yankee Stadium is yet another reason why. It’s almost too perfect,
this rematch
of last year’s magical but disastrous showdown, mystically predetermined
in its makeup, exquisitely undetermined in its likely outcome. Literary
men may be Red Sox fans, but the literature they write is rarely
as compelling as the story line of this team.

Just when we are most confident, as we were in the late
innings of Game 7 last year, is the point at which they let us down.To
be a lifelong Red Sox fan is to accept this fate to its godless core,
then to cheer in groundless optimism.But now there’s something different
at play: redemption. We have been given that rare gift of another bite
at the apple, a true second chance.