If athletes are laughably superstitious — and it’s a documented fact that they are — then sports fans are howl-out-loud superstitious. Take me. There was no way I was going back to Harlem to watch Game 2 of this World Series. Not after what I witnessed there on several big TV screens on opening night — the San Francisco Giants beating my beloved Detroit Tigers like a dirty rug.

So on Thursday evening I changed out of the cursed black jeans and black shirt I’d worn in Harlem the night before, made a phone call, then walked to a pub near my home in Alphabet City. Luck, as all sports fans know, comes from what you wear, what you eat and drink, where you sit, who sits near you, and other equally unknowable but potent forces.

As I settled onto my bar stool, the omens looked promising. The beer was cold. The Giants’ starting pitcher was somebody named Madison Bumgarner, which sounds like a despicable WASP character in a Tom Wolfe novel. Meanwhile, the Tigers’ starting pitcher, Doug Fister, absorbed a line drive off the side of his skull and kept pitching. Inning after inning, nobody scored, which meant the Tigers were not losing.

The only thing missing was my good-luck charm, a guy named Chris Mazurek who I’d bumped into on a nearby street the day before. He was wearing a Tigers cap, that inky blue, that gorgeous gothic “D” in front, and I asked if he was from Detroit. “Warren, just outside,” he said, and we talked about the Tigers and exchanged phone numbers and made vague plans to catch a World Series game together in Alphabet City.