Beverly West long ago gave her heart to the Chicago Cubs, who in turn almost stopped it cold in the World Series.

Turns out Game 7 wasn’t do or die just for the team, but West, too. Fraught with anxiety after waiting decades for the Cubs to win it all, she suffered a heart attack in front of her TV late in the game. She tried to gut it out and stick to the tube (just like the night before, she now sheepishly admits), but the pain pushed her to call for help — first from above, then by 911.

“Lord," she said, looking up, "I love ‘em. But I’m not going to let them kill me.”

An ambulance whisked her to an emergency room, where — after extra-inning drama ended in a Cubs win — nurses revealed the final score.

“They told me if I’d waited any longer, I would’ve died,” she says, chuckling.

The Peoria gal began bleeding Cubbie Blue at age 9 in 1944, when her father was assigned to a naval ship in World War II. Worried for his safety, she found comfort in Cubs radio broadcasts.

When the war ended in 1945, she stuck with the Cubs. After all, the team that year won the National League pennant, so why not stick with a winner?

Her favorite player was Phil Cavarretta, the Chicago native who signed with the Cubs out of high school and hit for the cycle in his professional debut at age 17 with the Peoria Tractors. In her teens, she became so renowned for her Cubs fanaticism that the Journal Star sports section did a story about the quaint curiosity of a high school girl rooting feverishly for an also-ran baseball team.

Not long after school, she married Dick West. They took a honeymoon to Chicago, including a trip to her beloved Wrigley Field.

Did he always share her ardor for the Cubs? The 84-year-old grins and says, “I had to, if I wanted to eat.”

Over the decades, they’d make occasional trips to see the team play, but they mostly would watch games on TV. This year, from the living room of their simple but elegant home in Far North Peoria, they followed the Cubs compile the best record in baseball. Beverly West favors Addison Russell, the team’s young shortstop.

“If you look at him during the games, he’s having so much fun,” she says. “He has the biggest smile on his face.”

She smiled along as the Cubs marched through the first two rounds of the playoffs. But as the Cleveland Indians went up 3-1 in the Series, she became increasingly tense. On Nov. 1, while watching Game 6 from her sofa, she started feeling chest pain.

She waived it off for a while. After a mild heart attack in 2011, she was given a prescription for nitroglycerin in the event of chest pain. But before Game 6, she’d never used it. Instead of grabbing for the nitro bottle, she grabbed her own remedies, starting with her ever-present Cubs tumbler.

“I filled that with ice and held it to my chest,” she says. “Then I ate some frozen yogurt. The pain was so hot.”

Ice and yogurt? That sounds like a recipe for a smoothie, not first aid.

“I wasn’t sure what the pain was,” she says with a shrug. “I thought maybe it was a panic attack.”

The Cubs won, but she still felt a sting in her chest. So, she used the nitro, plus a sleeping pill.

“I woke up in the morning and felt fine,” she chirps.

But that night was Game 7: all or nothing. As the game wore on, despite the Cubs taking a lead, West felt uneasy. She couldn’t believe it when Manager Joe Maddon pulled starting pitcher Kyle Hendricks.

“I have to admit, I got mad at Maddon,” she says.

Her chest started feeling that hot pain again. She walked out of the room for a while, hoping to calm down. But even as the Cubs went up 6-3, the pressure grew, in West’s head as well as her chest.

“The pain was very severe,” she says. “I thought it really was going to kill me.”

So, her husband called 911. EMTs arrived and started taking her vitals, treating her away from the TV. But they did keep her updated with good news: through the top of the eighth inning, the Cubs were still leading.

Her husband says, “I think that made her feel better.”

But the EMTs determined West had suffered a heart attack and needed to get to an ER fast. They rushed her to Proctor Hospital in the nick of time, just as the Cubs were about to blow a 3-run lead and go into extra innings with the championship in the balance.

At Proctor, West was greeted by a nurse in a Cubs T-shirt. As a medical team worked on her, she was distracted from the game. But when she stabilized, several Cubs-fan nurses delivered the news she’d waited to hear more than 70 years: they’d won the Series. As a bonus, the nurses broke into “Go, Cubs Go.”

Hooked to tubes and monitors, West was happy how the game turned out — well, except for the heart attack.

“I lost 15 percent function of my heart, “ she says, then starts laughing. “I’m afraid the Cubs had eroded it for many years.”

After a week in the hospital, she is back at home again, taking it easy. With the Cubs having finally won a Series, she doesn’t think next season will carry as much pressure — for the team or her heart.

“It was just the shock that maybe, finally they were going to go all the way,” she says before grinning wide. “And they did.”

PHIL LUCIANO is a Journal Star columnist. He can be reached at pluciano@pjstar.com, facebook.com/philluciano and (309) 686-3155. Follow him on Twitter.com/LucianoPhil.