CHICAGO -- We arrived at the corner of Sheffield and Waveland around 9 a.m., and a rough count put only 125 people ahead in line. We didn't have tickets to the game, at least most of us didn't, so we wanted to stand with a crowd of fellow fans in Murphy's Bleachers, the famous baseball bar's patio in the glow of the Wrigley red neon sign. We came because we felt compelled to be close to it, to know this electricity and claim a piece of it for ourselves. We wanted to know what it felt like in Chicago, when the World Series finally returned to town. The memories would be something to hold onto, long after the souvenirs were gone. It would be a shared experience to find the silly and overwrought things we felt for a baseball team.

We wanted proof we weren't insane.

Then we paid a $100 cover to go into a bar without tables or chairs, and we stood and drank beer for the next nine hours.

We ordered shots and burgers and beers. In the hour before the first pitch, we cheered when Eddie Vedder came in the back door of the bar, through the alley by the train tracks. We cursed the fire marshal, who decided to police these bars on their biggest weekend in history. We saw Vedder lean over the railing from the roof and throw a towel down into the crowd. We serenaded him.

"Someday we'll go all the way," we sang.

Before Game 4, Murphy's Bleachers was full of Cubs fans hoping for the best. Matthew Thomas for ESPN

We showed off the photo of our mother on our phone, of her holding the newspaper that came out the morning after the Cubs won the pennant. She has Alzheimer's and thought we were messing with her at first. We are named Todd and we are drunk. We laughed at how much we'd paid for a ticket to tomorrow night's game, and then we said, with complete earnestness, "Today Todd doesn't have to worry about. That's Tomorrow Todd."

The national anthem began and we sang, all of us -- an entire bar, with men taking off ball caps and putting them over their hearts. The cops outside stood at attention, too, and we screamed out the last lines. Then we started chanting, "F--- Joe Buck ... F--- Joe Buck," because, well, we were drunk and nervous.

After the Cubs went up 1-0, Chicago fans felt as if the tide had finally turned. Matthew Thomas for ESPN

A breeze blew through the back bar. We dressed up as Harry Caray. When the Cubs scored first, we rang the ship's bell, hanging in a corner by an enormous 10-point elk. We ordered shots of Jameson to celebrate. We don't drink Protestant hooch in Murphy's Bleachers. We hung signs in our apartment windows across from the bar, signs that read, "It's gonna happen." We really believed that -- especially early, in those brief moments when the Cubs led.

We got aggressively drunk when the Indians tied, and then the spiral began when the Indians took the lead. The bar became quiet, except for a group who chanted down near the Waveland Avenue patio. There was a television camera set up nearby, which probably explains the chanting. We act like a fool when we're putting on a show for TV, but the purest expression of sports fandom is the quiet internal burn, with only brief glimpses breaking the surface: a cigarette smoked clean down to the filter, or a head hung, resting in two hands, slumped over a bar. Today Todd clinched and unclenched his jaw. Tomorrow Todd won't remember doing that at all.

We turned to a man next to us and said, "We're in this together. Let's just hold it together."

But then the tide turned back -- the Indians took the lead in the next inning. Matthew Thomas for ESPN

The same people who ordered shots to celebrate the 1-0 lead now ordered shots to make the 4-1 deficit feel a bit better. We started looking for company for the night and found a guy from Tampa, Florida. We touched his side, and told our girlfriend about his muscular back, and when we did a shot together, we kissed his cheek. His friends tied a balloon to him in case he got lost. We called him "our future husband."

"If you don't believe in love at Murphy's Bleachers," we said, "you don't believe in love."

We texted a friend: "F--- Kluber."

The mood in the bar turned, a little menacing in a pocket or two but mostly just empty and hollow, like no one could remember what we felt in the 9 a.m. sunshine, when so many great things seemed not only possible but likely, and to some, even ordained. That feeling died quick and hard. We turned away from the television and said, "I'm not looking anymore."

We signed our bar tabs when the Indians went up 7-1, then walked out into a chilly night, the blue Christmas lights on the Murphy's trees now seeming a little sad. Three people left the bar during the seventh-inning stretch and sang along with the crowd.

"It's a shame," they sang in a loud voice at the end.

The bars began to empty before the game even ended. Matthew Thomas for ESPN

The bars emptied during the last two innings. People walked quietly down Waveland.

The whole point of coming to Wrigleyville was to find out how it feels, and we found a feeling all right, just not the one we wanted. That feeling remains unknown and elusive, still out of reach, after 108 years, after four games. We wore technicolor fedoras and $50 fitted New Era hats. The crowd waiting on the Red Line stretched out into Addison. A woman sat texting on a stoop in a Cubs jersey and Chuck Taylor's. One stoop down, two guys were eating apples, watching the silent march of people heading away from Wrigley Field.