Read: The Red Sox need a World Series win

Third, and most potently, the Red Sox’s 86-years-long exploration of futility and failure still occupies outsize space in the heads of older New Englanders. (As Leonhardt put it in his report on Boston sports greatness, “If you’re a Boston sports fan over the age of 30, it may be emotionally difficult for you to think of your teams as successful.”) For years, the baseball team’s remarkable and creative string of failures was a binding agent for the whole of the region. Loss is annealing; the team’s chronic, tragic missteps provided a kind of lingua franca of shared suffering. I remember in the 1980s when Stephen King, the bard of northern New England and the doyen of horror writing, was asked what the scariest thing he could imagine was: It’s the bottom of the ninth, with two outs. The Red Sox are one out away from finally winning their first World Series since 1918. And the denizens of Fenway Park look up to see nuclear missiles streaking across the sky. (That I can now find no evidence of King’s ever saying this may mean he said it in the years before everything was captured for eternity by the internet—or it may mean that the Red Sox–addled nuclear anxieties of my own mind somehow formulated this as a bit of apocrypha that now feels like a real memory. In any case, he certainly should have said this.)

But this emotional reality no longer comports with statistical fact, and it hasn’t for nearly 15 years now. Besides, who would trade the piling up of championships for years of defeat?

Well, I might. In August of 2005, as the then-defending world champion Red Sox trudged through the dog days of summer on their way to a Wild Card berth and first-round loss to the Chicago White Sox, I wrote in an essay for The Boston Globe that something had been lost when the Red Sox traded in their years of accursed failure for a championship. To this day, nothing I’ve ever written has attracted so much invective—a testament to the snarling intensity of Boston fandom, or perhaps just to the depth of my obtuseness.

“Before 2004,” I wrote then, “the basic Red Sox mode was that of tragedy,” and then I quoted an essay from the Catholic journal Commonweal. “The Sox remind us that life is a trial; that it raises hopes to crush them cruelly; that it ends badly … A Red Sox fan is an Irishman, an Armenian, reciting ancient hurts by ancient enemies … By now Red Sox suffering surpasses an individual human life span. It is a cathedral of loss and pain. It is holy.” But, I asked, “if this suffering no longer surpasses a human life span—if it is no longer suffering—is it any longer holy?” And I wondered further whether, now that we’d finally won a World Series—and then if we started to accumulate more victories (as we since have)—the force of our yearning would be diminished. “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp,” as Robert Browning wrote, “Or what’s a heaven for?”