The Dream

I had the strangest dream last night. I dreamt that the Chicago Cubs won the National League pennant:

One drought down, one to go.

Wrigleyville erupted in a joyous celebration Saturday night when the Cubs’ 71-year World Series wait at long last came to an end. When Yasiel Puig hit into a double play for the final outs of Saturday night’s 5-0 victory over the Dodgers in Game 6 of the National League Championship Series, the Cubs sealed a date with the Indians in the 2016 Fall Classic, beginning Tuesday night in Cleveland.

It’s OK to say it out loud now, Chicago. The Cubs are National League champions. The Cubs are in the World Series for the first time since 1945.

In recognition of the Cubs’ achievement the Trib re-published its front page new article from the last time the Cubs won the pennant on September 30, 1945.

To place the upcoming World Series between Cleveland and Chicago in some perspective, it’s been 108 years since the Cubs last won the world series. We had never heard of a world war. The first Ford Model-T had yet to roll off Henry Ford’s revolutionary assembly line. The world was dominated by empires (British, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, Ottoman, Japanese, and metropolitan France’s colonial empire). The average life expectancy was 47 years. Only 8% of home had a telephone. About 230 murders were reported in the entire country. There was no such thing as television and there was no such thing as commercial radio—radio itself was a curiosity. It wasn’t just a different time. It was a different world.

My own commemoration will be to treat you to the late, great Stevie Goodman’s classic, “A Dying Cubs Fan’s Last Request”:

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