As an 8-year-old in Fall River in 1986, Kelly Wrobel was too young to understand why her older brother and other Red Sox fans were so traumatized by the team's loss in the World Series. Even as she grew up and heard the tale of '86 obsessively told and retold by Sox fans -- and even as she became a fervent fan herself -- she didn't quite get it.
"I couldn't imagine crying over a game being lost," Wrobel said yesterday.
Well, she can imagine it now. In the wee small hours of Friday morning, as the Brown University graduate student watched the American League pennant slip from the Sox' grasp, Wrobel shed a few tears herself. "I was a basket case," she admitted.
She had a lot of company yesterday. For younger fans -- as well as for new arrivals to Boston who may have known the team's history but didn't really feel it in a visceral way until now -- the loss to the Yankees was a grisly ceremony that endowed them with true citizenship in Red Sox Nation. "This `Curse' thing, it's starting to look a little more rational," said Peter Zelken, 23, a researcher at Harvard Business School. "We were five outs away from a World Series, and they still couldn't pull it off."
Then again, Zelken added, "Would the Sox be the Sox if they had won last night?"
Ah, spoken like a true Red Sox fan. Zelken's fatalistic sentiment was one of many pieces of evidence that the cataclysm of '03 will be a defining moment for young fans the way the heartbreaks of '86, '78, '75, '67, and '46 were for previous generations. Yet, as was the case with many who lived through those excruciating near-misses, the dramatic joyride of this season has also tightened the bonds of loyalty to the team among some younger fans. Swearing at the Sox, or at least manager Grady Little? Yes. Swearing off the Sox? Not yet.
"I'm definitely hooked," said 19-year-old Frances Haugen, a student at Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering in Needham. "I've been initiated into the Sox culture."
That culture includes a legacy of suffering and waiting, only to suffer and wait some more. Younger fans now have to shoulder their share of that legacy as part of the price of admission into the club. Before the loss to the Yankees, many were utterly fed up with talk of curses and history. Many still are, but they now know deep in their bones that rooting for this team is an emotionally complicated proposition, that it's not always a feel-good story of "comeback kids" who "cowboy up" whenever the chips are down.
"You feel indoctrinated into Red Sox Nation after this," said Gregory McLean, 29, of Everett. "I felt it back in '86, but now, at this age, you kind of understand it a little bit more. It hurts a little bit more."
Part of the pain stems from the fact that so many believed this was the year -- and this was the team -- to go all the way. "They were our last best hope, a great team, my favorite team ever," said Julie Zanfagna, 27, a professional recruiter who was raised in Warwick, R.I., and now lives in San Diego. "I've been consumed by baseball, and I'm sick this morning."
Part of it stems from the widespread belief that the Sox lost not because the Yankees were better but because Little failed to lift Pedro Martinez before the deluge struck in the eighth inning. "It's not like in '86, when there was that one instant," said Janine White, a 31-year-old paralegal from Cambridge. "This was like an implosion, like a car wreck that was slow. . . . I was hysterical, crying. I felt like it was a death."
And maybe, just maybe, part of the pain can be traced to the startling realization that even the 21st-century Sox could not escape the coils of history that ensnared them for so much of the 20th century.
"As soon as the home run was hit, I turned the TV off," said McLean, who works in the investment division of John Hancock. "I sat there in silence, and I said to myself, `Damn you, Bambino.' And once I said it, I said, `Oh my God, I believe in the Curse.' "
Even amid their own anguish, younger fans were able to muster some empathy for older fans who have been through so many more disappointments. "My dad is my best friend, but I haven't been able to give him a call yet," said McLean. "He was so excited after Game 6. I would not know what to say to him."
In the second inning Thursday night, Tim Olenn, a 27-year-old attorney raised in Providence who now lives in St. Petersburg, Fla., got out a celebratory cigar. But he did not light it. "I was thinking of '86," he said yesterday. For nine innings he sat there with the cigar in his mouth, unlit. The cigar now resides in the bushes outside his window, where he hurled it when Aaron Boone hit the Yankees' game-winning homer. "This is worse than '86, because you could see this coming," said Olenn.
His brother, Adam, a 30-year-old Web producer at Berklee College of Music, predicted hard emotional times ahead.
"They take you to that great height and then drop you," he said. "That's what stings."
Yet he and many other fans also were forcing themselves to remember the good times along with the bad, and reminding themselves that more good times may lie ahead.
"Last night was a legendary game," said Zelken. "Anyone who grows up in New England, to go extra innings in the seventh game of the ALCS is more than you can dream of. The Sox gave 'em hell. It's tough to see them go, but you've got to stay with them."
By Don Aucoin of the Globe staff.
This article appeared on Boston.Com on October 18, 2003.
Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.