BY JOSH ABEL

In print | Published November 6, 2008

As a Phillies fan, I am having trouble understanding what just happened last month. I think I watched them breeze through the playoffs to capture their first World Series in my lifetime, but nothing in my years of avidly following the team and the league suggests that that should have or could have just happened.

For five and half months, the 2008 season resembled all the other 2000-era Phillies seasons. The Phillies were a good team with a good deal of star power, but there were some noticeable holes as well. A weak back end of the rotation and a few dead spots in the lineup looked like they might doom the Phillies campaign. So like every other year since 2001, the Phillies entered the final few weeks of the season with a real-but-not-great possibility of making the playoffs and contending.

From 2001 through 2006, this same situation would always unfold and the Phillies would always fall short – a few games away from the much dreamt-of playoff spot. Last year, they pulled it off and won the National League East on the last day of the season but were eliminated from the playoffs without winning a game. Up through mid-September, 2008 was shaping up according to plan: close enough to dream, but it just looked like they would not have the firepower to make it happen.

Then, on September 11th, a funny thing happened: the Phillies stopped losing. They closed out the regular season with 13 wins in 16 games, easily overcoming sizeable deficits in the standings, and then cruised to the World Series title with 11 wins in 14 playoff games.
Err, I think that’s what I saw.

In no venue other than sports can something like this happen. Where else can a formula that has so often led to disappointment spit out a beautiful outcome every once in a while? I was four years old the last time the Phillies played in a World Series. Since then, I’ve been waiting for their next opportunity, watching thousands of games hoping it could somehow happen. And every season for the past eight, that lovely prize would seem possible, and it would approach quickly as September rolled around. Then suddenly it would disappear amidst a four-game losing streak or some other meltdown. The Phillies marched us down that same path this season, and though it is my nature as a baseball fan to hope, as a Phillies fan, I could recognize all the signs of another near miss. I waited with a pit in my stomach for the other shoe to drop and for the World Series’s quick approach to suddenly halt.

But it never did, and this season, which looked to be another source of heartbreak, became something completely different over the course of five weeks. The season transformed from a pit in my stomach to the very thing I had been dreaming of for a lifetime.

In the wake of the World Series championship, we tell ourselves that we saw it coming – that we saw the difference in this team. “Well, with Brad Lidge anchoring the bullpen, this team really was built to win.” “They had never had an ace like Cole Hamels this decade, so they were finally able to get over the hump this time.” But we didn’t. In each year this decade, we’ve said that that year’s club had the new element that would lead it to the promised land. The simple, if bizarre, truth is that this Phillies team was probably not that much better than the ones that broke our hearts time and again for the past seven years. They won only three more regular season games than in 2007 and had a markedly inferior offense. Though the pitching was certainly much improved, the 2008 version of the team just did not look like it would break the trend and push deep into October.

But then it did. And that’s what makes us love sports. In early March, we watch Duke play Acorn State because we want to see a #16 seed stun a #1 in March Madness. It’s not going to happen. But then again, it could, so we watch. When our team trails by four runs in the 9th inning, we watch, praying for the lineup to erupt and come back. It’s not going to happen – except for the rare time it does, and you certainly don’t want to miss that one. So as a sports fan, you root for the #16, you hope for that 9th-inning comeback, and you pray for that World Series run. Amid all the crushing iterations that betray your faith, that magical one is lurking. And when it arrives, it is beautiful, and all the heartbreaks of yesterday are instantly worth it. As of October 29, 2008, I can tell you that with complete confidence.

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