If There Is Joy in Cubville, Let’s Dream Big Today
After 108 years, Chicago’s lovable losers are World Series champions. Maybe, just maybe, anything is possible.
Cubs fans celebrate the team’s first World Series title since 1908. (Nam Y. Huh / AP)
The Cubs are World Series champions.
The last time anyone could say that was 1908. For those keeping score, that’s 108 years of suffering for Cubs Nation. Not too many people who witnessed Wednesday night’s 8-7, 10-inning victory over the Cleveland Indians were around to cheer Chicago the last time the team took baseball’s greatest trophy.
Over more than a century, Cubs fans might have taken some comfort in the First Noble Truth of Buddhism, which says that all life is suffering. Even with that tenet, those in many schools of Buddhism are offered a path toward liberation—toward nirvana, or enlightenment, the ultimate state of bliss. This is a place of perfect happiness, free of all troubles and worries, an end to suffering. Since the last out of Game 7 was recorded, there has been nothing but a secular nirvana in Wrigleyville: The Cubs have not struck out for the first time in more than 39,000 days.
Before this moment, Cubs fans, at the end of every season, would say: “Wait until next year. Someday, the Cubs will win the World Series.” Someday is today. And today is a day to dream big.
If the Cubs can win the World Series, maybe anything is possible. Maybe there’s hope for humankind’s real problems. Revolutionary change, the equivalent of climbing Mount Kilimanjaro daily, might not be beyond the reach of men and women of goodwill.
The Cubs did not win the World Series by accident. They had a plan and put all the right pieces in place to achieve the impossible dream. People at every level of the organization—from the uniform washer to the manager (Joe Maddon) and the president of baseball operations (Theo Epstein)—did their jobs. And the players produced on the field.
But all epic success stories require a bit of serendipity, providence and magic. And that’s what happened when the Cubs won in seven—a storybook ending in a contest that many are calling the greatest baseball game ever played. It doesn’t take Stephen Hawking to realize the stars are aligned.
Sure, it’s a little crazy to think that the end of long suffering for a baseball team and its supporters could give birth to a sense of possibility that might reach around the globe.
But the Cubs are World Series champions.
Poetic justice has been served.
Real justice can be next.
Someday is today.
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