Meanwhile, for members of the Nation of a certain age, especially those folks of my parents' generation, not a single playoff game likely ever passes without a moment of mournful thought about how sad it is that the great Red Sox of them all, Ted Williams, did not live to see any of this. Indeed, if you are coming of age this autumn to revel in these Red Sox victories you likely don't remember a world of baseball or of Boston in which Teddy Ballgame was the King—or even alive. He died on July 5, 2002, 845 days before the Red Sox won the 2004 World Series, their first in 86 years. If you are 18 today, you were seven years old then.

I do not mean to suggest in any of this that young fans can't or don't appreciate the team's decade of success the way we fogeys do. Of course they can and do. I don't mean to imply that the newest members of the Nation are blase about these championships. Of course they aren't. Great baseball is great drama and great drama is timeless. It's just different than it was in 2004—and it will be different no matter how many more times the team is talented and lucky enough to win it all again, if this team is ever talented and lucky enough to win it all again. I think my son gets that, at least I hope he does, as he savors from afar yet another Duck Boat parade in the coming days.

For being "Boston Strong" and for so many other reasons, the Red Sox this season earned all the praise they are receiving today. If nothing else, they mastered the art of exceeding low expectations. After the past two dismal seasons, in which they were widely written off, no sober Red Sox fan tonight would tell you that in March he or she expected more than a .500 season in 2013, a restoration of pride as a pathway to success next year or the year after that. No one could have predicted that David Ortiz would become even more clutch, that grouchy John Lackey would return to pitch so well, or that the bullpen would be so solid after so many injuries. This is why we watch sports. Not just because we want to see the predictable fail but because we want to see the unfathomable occur.

This team, this great, hard-working team, was always more than the sum of its parts. The beat reporters who covered it talked all season about "redemption" as a theme—so many players with so much to prove after so many poor seasons in 2011 and 2012. But it wasn't the aching, long-ago redemption 2004 meant to the Nation's beloved Johnny Pesky for his split-second failure in the 1946 World Series. It was the quick, instant-gratification redemption perfectly suited to our modern times. The Red Sox were able this mercurial year to redeem themselves, from pitch to pitch, strike to strike, out to out, hit to hit, without relying upon some future generation of Red Sox player to bring redemption. And isn't that quick second chance all any of us could ever hope for after times are tough?