‘Next year’ finally arrives for overjoyed Chicago Cubs fans

Did you ever think you would see the day? It was just the way it was.

The feat the Cubs completed overwhelmed some fans. “And maybe, after 108 years, you get some divine intervention”.

Wednesday night’s victory for the Chicago Cubs meant much more to Fred McNally, 85, than just a World Series win.

His two-run, score-tying home run in the eighth inning of an epic Game 7 was like a little kid’s dream come true.

Instead, it goes to Jake Arrieta, who won Games 2 and 6 for the Cubs.

So now everything has changed.

“When they tied it up it felt like it was over, they (the Cubs) had lost”, said Mike Dillon, a banking executive who drove to a tavern just outside Wrigley to be among other fans. All the heartbreak, all the odd occurrences, all the ghosts, they can all be put to rest.

But there’s something else. And rightfully so. The players on this team ended a championship drought that extended for more than 100 years, so they deserve everything that they have coming to them.

Let that soak in for one moment.

Pluto says it all comes down to the longer you play a team with better talent, the more likely that team is to win.

The late commissioner of Major League Baseball, Bart Giamatti, a scholar of Renaissance English and former president of Yale University, wrote that baseball was a metaphor for life.

For awhile, it looked like a postseason that started with Orioles manager Buck Showalter getting harpooned by the national media for holding back closer Zach Britton in the American League wild-card game might end with Maddon getting ravaged for a whole string of pitching decisions in Cleveland the past two nights. The team didn’t even appear in a World Series between 1945 and 2016.

“I just made a few mistakes and they were able to hit a couple home runs off of them”, Kluber said. Manager Terry Francona went into the series with a plan to use their three starters on limited rest, hope they could get a lead and then bring out reliever Andrew Miller. But the Cardinals franchise bests the Indians by one year in the “consecutive years without a championship” category. Next year, they very well could be.

As the celebration progressed, thousands of fans poured into the streets leading away from Wrigley, many of them singing “We Are The Champions”. “They were all-in with us and they were proud fans – and they should have been with the way that we represented this city”. Dexter Fowler became the first man to lead off a Game 7 with a home run.

He also appeared to have predicted that the Cubs and Indians would face off in the World Series earlier this month, although he was off on the victor and how long it would take.

So where do we go from here?