CLEVELAND – Around midnight, when the city of Chicago throbbed with delight and the euphoria of what had happened was in full bloom, a car pulled out of Wrigley Field. The Chicago Cubs were going to the World Series, but first Jon Lester needed to go home, because the rest of the Cubs were headed there, too.

“I wasn’t abiding by many of the traffic laws,” Lester said. “I was going down the opposite way on streets. I was telling the guys in the car, ‘If we can get away with it any night, it’s tonight.’ ”

About a block from his house, Lester’s phone rang. It was his wife, Farrah. Lester figured she wanted to let him know everything was set up for the celebratory soiree. Instead, she said, the party at Wrigley Field had spilled down the street.

“Someone is TPing the house,” she said.

Lester peeled around the corner and up the alley next to his house. He rolled down the driver’s-side window. The scofflaws – a few guys in their early 30s, Lester said – froze, melted at Lester’s glare and slunk away having unfurled only a couple of rolls.

View photos Jon Lester had quite the celebration after the Cubs won the NLCS. (AP) More

Toilet-paper embellishment averted, Lester and the Cubs could get on with the night’s events. While the rest of the city rejoiced over the Cubs going to the World Series for the first time in 71 years – and the real possibility of their first championship in 108 – the team retreated to Lester’s home and stayed up until sunrise eating and drinking and listening to Eddie Vedder strum his guitar and sing songs. It was the perfect party for this team that has stared at expectations and met them, one last night of ribaldry before the ultimate test begins here Tuesday.

Lester will take the mound for the Cubs in Game 1 against the Cleveland Indians at Progressive Field (8 p.m. ET, Fox), the embodiment of everything these Cubs are about. He signed his $155 million deal with Chicago before the Cubs were the Cubs, conquerors of the National League, heavy championship favorites, darlings of October. All this was within reason, certainly, with a strong core in place and reinforcements on the come from the minor leagues. It wasn’t a leap of faith so much as a hop. Still, Lester has been the Cubs’ Pied Piper, urging others to join not just for the promise of seeing what it’s like to win a championship on the North Side of Chicago but for nights like Saturday, when there was no better place to be in the world than his house.

Right after the Cubs disposed of the Dodgers, Lester planted the bug in his teammates’ ears: Party at my place. The Cubs’ traveling secretary, Vijay Tekchandani, sent out a team-wide text message to remind everyone, in case the beer and bubbly during the raucous clinch party gave anyone a case of the forgetsies. Almost nobody missed it. In came Kris Bryant and Anthony Rizzo, Dexter Fowler and Addison Russell, Kyle Hendricks and Travis Wood, Miguel Montero and David Ross, Jason Hammel and Jason Heyward, Ben Zobrist and Jake Arrieta, Willson Contreras and Justin Grimm, Theo Epstein and Jed Hoyer, dozens of other friends, family, confidants. And in the middle of it was Vedder, the lead singer of Pearl Jam, a dyed-blue Cubs fan and the rare celebrity not just to come to the game but stay for the after-party.

“In Boston, nobody really hung out,” Lester said. “They’d just come to the game and leave. But he’s a huge Cubs fan. He’d rather hang out with us than go play and be a rock star.”

On top of Lester’s garage is a deck of sorts, and it served as the hub for Vedder’s private show. Lester pulled out his guitar and strummed along. Ross did the same. Hammel, a longtime Pearl Jam fan, fawned. They sang and drank and sang a little more and drank a lot more. A pair of cops stood outside to make sure nobody tried to get in – or drop another Charmin bomb.

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