You may have a pessimistic streak born of self-preservation, learning over bitter years not to get your hopes up, knowing that if any team could blow a lead, walk in the winning run, leave the bases loaded, throw a one-hitter but score no runs, it would be your team. That the heat of a pennant race will always prove too much, no matter how promising the early days of the season might seem.
Not everyone knows the special, unbearable pain of being just "one out away" from a series win, or worse yet, "one strike away", only to give up a big hit and see it all unravel. Not everyone knows what it's like to live for decades under a curse, but every MLB fan knows their dreams of a pennant are more likely crushed than realized.
Every MLB fan knows what it feels like to "wait till next year".
Oh, but there was that year...
The summer of '88, when somehow the Dodgers were good again, and somehow it just seemed...possible. It couldn't really happen, I knew, but...there was just...something...
I left for church camp with the Dodgers in first place by 3 games, the kind of lead that seems insurmountable when you're behind, but feels flimsy when you're ahead. I knew I would be away from the standings for a week, clueless as to how the Dodgers were doing in that crucial stretch of summer, in those archaic but blissful days before constant contact with everything, when you could go a week in the woods without hearing or seeing any current events at all.
Church camp was more than great, and I was mostly able to put the NL West pennant race out of my mind for the time being. It was the kind of week that changes a lot of things for a fourteen year-old, in that exciting, time-squeezed, sped-up evolution that makes a kid feel like a chapter has been finished and left behind, and a new one begun, in the way an adult might feel after the passing of several years.
Near the end of the week, as I walked through the dining hall, I spotted a newspaper that someone had left on a table. The paper was out of place, and served as a reminder that I would soon be home and back to normal life. But more than this, the paper meant an opportunity for an update on the thing I had been forced to ignore all week.
I couldn't bear to look, but I had to look.
Without a doubt, the Dodgers had faltered; there was no way their lead was still healthy. In fact, they had probably dropped out of first place altogether, said the inner voice of the grizzled, fourteen year-old cynic. I prepared myself as well as I could for the disappointment the standings would surely deliver, but as hard as I thought I was, I wasn't prepared for 8.
8 games.
The Dodgers were in first place in the NL West by 8 games!
The Boys in Blue had run the table while I had been away, and now held a lead that truly would require a dramatic change of course for any other team to overcome. I'm not sure I had ever seen my team in such a commanding position before. There was no way around it. They really were good, and this was actually happening. The postseason was very likely.
I shouted for joy, right there in the dining hall, and some 30 years later, my eyes still well up.
Yes, the Dodgers went on to win the World Series that year, and yes, it was that World Series when Kirk Gibson hit that home run in Game 1, pumping his fist while limping around second base.
But it was that moment in the dining hall, the kind of moment when faith, hope, and love each play a role, and the greatest of these is love.
Faith can falter, hope can fade, but love...
Love sustains it all, doesn't it?
Oh, God, help us savor rare moments like this, when our faith, hope, and love actually do line up with the events around us, even with events we cannot control, and even when those events are not of eternal consequence.
And give us strength to hold on when our faith, or our hope, or our love grow weak.
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