And Then It Rained

And then it rained.

Time stopped. For 17 minutes, baseball time stopped. The umpire said the rain wasn’t supposed to fall on the ballpark in Cleveland, but then, unexpectedly it did. Hmmm.  The Cubs were living a movie script no one would dare write because the plot twists, if you made them up, would not be believed. World Series, Game 7, the Cubs with a small lead, then a bigger lead, then an insurmountable lead; until the Indians scored late off the sure-fire relief pitcher who never gives up a home run, until this game. And then, with the score tied, the Cubs in a seeming freefall, it rained.

The Cubs players moved inside, into the strength and conditioning room, and an impromptu team meeting was held, the pep talk reminding the team to focus not on winning or losing, but on “how we got here.” Someone said, “This is going to make it sweeter boys.” And then the rain stopped.  It took almost as long to remove the tarp covering the field as rained.  And then the game resumed.

Then boys and girls, women and men, fans reliving childhood dreams and creating lifetime memories of “where I was when it happened”, as that last toss from a charging third baseman to the glove waiting at first was squeezed into the joyous final out, they all screamed, yelled, smiled, shouted, cried tears which said, “Cubs Win, Cubs Win, Cubs Win!!!”

History will tell you that the team which won was the “Best Team in Baseball” in 2016.  And when you are living into the destiny that comes with that label; when you are dealing with 108 years of angst and frustration and waiting, well, sometimes you just try too hard.  Sometimes you need to step back and remember, we don’t have to do anything special, we just need to play the game.  But it is hard to find time to remind a team of that in the final innings of the final game.  Unless, of course, the storm clouds suddenly shift just enough to persuade the umps, “time to stop the game”.

Following the historic, epic, monumental win the television picture showed Theo Epstein, president of baseball operations, bouncing his young son and just as he turned to kiss his wife, he quickly looked up to the sky from when the rain had come and, I swear, I saw him mouth the words that spoke for a nation of Cubs fans, “Thank you.”

And then it rained. Thank You, indeed.