Cubs-Red Sox-Palooza — Boston baseball’s feel-good festival of April 2017 — stands at 1-1 for the weekend. Boston’s ancient ballyard has never been a happier place in April. The Wallball Woodstock at Yaz-gur’s farm winds down Sunday night and if you have a game ticket and show up at Gate K/B when the gates open (6:35 p.m.) you can get your photograph taken with the Red Sox’ 2004 championship trophy and the Cubs’ 2016 bauble. That’s 194 years of Curse-bustin’ hardware, which should be worth the $20 recommended charity donation.

“This is good for the industry,’’ Cubs manager Joe Maddon said Saturday after a 7-4 win over the Red Sox. “This has been playoff-like baseball with two really good teams playing the game properly.’’

Can the Cubs stay here a few more days? If this really is a 2017 World Series preview (a lofty goal for the teetering Local Nine, I’ll admit), the Cracker Jack-eating baseball world should be very happy.

“They are the two most famous trophies in baseball history,’’ Theo Epstein noted Friday.


Theo, of course, is the common denominator of this early season celebration of baseball tradition. He was a 30-year-old GM when the Sox broke the 86-year drought in 2004, and soaked in more champagne when the Cubs’ 108-year-old plague was eradicated last autumn on a rainy night in Cleveland.

The Red Sox and Cubs are distant baseball cousins, walking hand-in-hand through the hardball desert over these last 110 years. The 20th-century Sox were masters of the near-miss, while the Cubs perfected the lovable loser tag and it’s only been in the new millennium that the two teams have emerged as centerfold brands for the national pastime. It’s no accident that MLB Network (Friday), Fox Sports (Saturday), and ESPN (Sunday) each grabbed a game of this ever-so-rare meeting of the fabled franchises. If you’re scoring at home, that’s Costas-to-Buck-to-Shulman, a broadcast booth’s Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance.


The Cubs do not come to Fenway to play the Red Sox very often. They first came here for the 1918 World Series (which started in early September because of World War I) and this weekend marks only their fifth visit in the last 99 years.

It has thus far been everything we could have hoped to see. Friday night was October-in-April as the Sox erupted for five first-inning runs and held off the surging Cubs in the late frames with Craig Kimbrel striking out the side in a high-leverage, stress-filled top of the ninth. Red Sox catcher Christian Vazquez said it felt like the World Series. He wouldn’t really know, of course. The Cubs, they know.

The quick-strike Cubs got their revenge Saturday, hitting three homers and recovering from a 3-0 deficit after three.

The takeaway from this series for a lot of Hub fans will be the odd notion that fans from the visiting team can actually make an impact at provincial Fenway. This has never happened before. It’s a routine dynamic at American League yards across the nation when legions of New Englanders overrun enemy parks and make it sound like a home game for the Red Sox. This has been happening for decades at Camden Yards, Tropicana Field, and the Oakland Alameda County Coliseum.

But it doesn’t happen here. Until this weekend. Cubs fans travel well and they made themselves heard at Fenway Friday and Saturday. It was weird to hear the crowd roar with approval when Kris Bryant homered off Drew Pomeranz Friday, and when Anthony Rizzo did the same off Steven Wright Saturday. Ask David Price how that feels. Every homer he surrendered to the Sox in the Trop (2008-2014) was greeted with raucous ovations.


“I can’t believe it,’’ said Cubs GM Jed Hoyer, who toiled in Boston for almost a decade under Theo. “I’m in the concourse and I hear the crowd roar and it’s impossible to tell if one of our guys hit a double or one of their guys made a great play.’’

Saturday in the park was just as much fun as Friday (OK, the Sox committed a season-high four errors, but let’s not get bogged down with facts here). Courageous Pete Frates and his family were guests of the Red Sox and Cubs and watched from the EMC Club behind home plate as old friend Kevin Youkilis (also known as Tom Brady’s brother-in-law) threw out a ceremonial first pitch to Dustin Pedroia. Seeing Youk on the mound, it was hard not to recall Pedroia’s mad defense of his teammate (“that’s not how we do things here”) when Youk was attacked by Bobby Valentine in 2012.

The Cubs sent the ever-agitated John Lackey to the mound and Lackey’s F-bombs could be heard from the press box, five floors above field level. Fans got to see five homers: Rizzo, Miguel Montero, and Ben Zobrist for the Cubs, a Lansdowne garage roof shot by Hanley Ramirez, and yet another parabola launched into the bullpen by Marty McFly (a.k.a. Andrew Benintendi). It was good clean fun for the ticketed 36,776.


After Lackey was pulled we got to see Koji Uehara, who came on for a perfect, 11-pitch seventh for the Cubs. When it was over, players and executives from both teams broke bread and toasted one another deep into the night at The Paradise on Commonwealth Avenue as part of Theo’s “Hot Stove Cool Music” charity event.

“I like a formulaic win where everybody does their job and then you go to a concert,’’ said Maddon.

It’s all true. The series has lived up to its billing. And for two days, all the rage has been sucked out of Fenway.

Strange days, indeed.

Dan Shaughnessy is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at dshaughnessy@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @Dan_Shaughnessy.