Suburban Valkyrie

Rooting for the Chicago Cubs to win the 2016 World Series brings everyone together

Something good finally happened.

That is the explanation for the unadulterated joy that is sweeping Cubs fans across the country.

Sure, the Cubbies’ 2016 World Series win was about ending the fabled 108-year drought. It ended the "curse" that some had come to believe haunted our team. But the reason that the screams of jubilation were so ear-piercing that they could be heard more than a mile away from Wrigley Field on Wednesday night had to do with so much more than baseball.

In a region of the country that feels forgotten, where the Caterpillar and Case-IH plants that once supported entire families have been shuttered for decades, where the formerly bustling shopping malls stand half empty, the Cubs win was finally something that had gone right. In a city grappling with racial tension and gun violence, baseball could bring people of all ages, backgrounds and colors together. In a time and a place where it felt like there was little left to believe in, belief in the long-suffering home team had finally paid off.

"I don't get the fans," a new friend of mine said during one World Series game last week. "I mean, I get that it's nice to win, and sad to lose, but I don't understand the crying. How can they be so invested in it?"

Of course, this, from a Yankees fan. A Bucks County man for whom life has gone pretty well, overall. A casual fan of a team whose name is practically synonymous with success, having won 27 World Series championships since 1923.

Before this year, the Cubs had won two. The last one - as anyone who hasn’t retreated to a cave to escape the 2016 presidential election season knows - was in 1908. Dexter Fowler, who led off Game 1 this year, became the first black Chicago Cub to appear in the World Series; the last Cubs team to make it even that far played before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier.

So, it's easy to not understand the jubilation of Cubs fans, when your team usually wins and your kids go to new schools with band practices and pretzel sales and pep rallies. When life isn't a series of compromises, even on necessities. Do I pay the electric bill or the car insurance? Buy the name brand canned goods or the generic?

When the prospects for your children's future seem bleaker than yours were, when you feel like your parents had it easier than you do, this one bright shining achievement is loaded with meaning. "It's gonna happen," was more than the Cubs rallying cry. It was the collective plea of families hanging desperately onto the ledge of hope. It reflects 108 optimistic winters of believing, in their team, yes, but also in themselves, in their families, in their futures, even in the face of generations of hardship. Believing in the idea that summer - and the proverbial “boys” thereof - would come again and bring a long-awaited victory.

It’s easy to pack in the fans when you win a lot. It’s harder when the likely end of the game is an “L” flag flying above Wrigley. But Cubs fans never gave up. And many held onto that thread of connection to their team no matter how far away their lives swept them from the city by the lake. My brother, Keith Larson, lives in Portland, Ore. now. He still flies to Chicago for the Cubs opener every year that he can afford it.

For some, of course, the win comes too late. My great-aunt Marilyn Wilson wanted to see a Cubs World Series win before she died. She held on until the very end, when she died in June 2015 at age 93.

It’s a pervasive cliche that we Midwesterners are of hardy stock, hard-working, friendly, and dependable. We are devoted, whether to friends and family, jobs, or baseball teams.

The funny part is that we really are those things. We hang on.

In my hometown of Moline, Illinois, you'll find generations of descendants of the Larsons and Johnsons and Swensons and Johannsons who came from Sweden in the late 1800s to work for Johnny Deere, who had moved his plow business to the town on the banks of the Mississippi River in 1848. They took the train from Chicago, stepping off, legend tells us, when the train conductor uttered the only English words they knew: “John Deere town.”

They typically arrived with few possessions but a determination to work hard and prosper. They mostly did, building the factories and the machines that built America and drove the Industrial Revolution. After the Civil War, freed slaves and other economic migrants from the defeated South came north to join them. And during the long summers, they all watched baseball. The steady, mostly predictable rhythm of the game matched that of their lives.

Over the decades, their descendants sported baseball caps with the iconic C, and they named their kids Addison and Clark. My contemporaries in high school hung posters of Ryne Sandberg on their bedroom walls. My family dog’s name was Dusty Baker, and even though that had been a nod to my father’s anomalous Dodger following, when Baker became the Cubs manager in 2003, it seemed to me as though it had been predestined.

What also seemed predestined to some was that somehow, some way, no matter the score or how favorable the predictions, the Cubs would manage to stumble yet again. On Wednesday night, when they blew a 5 to 1 lead, one of my high school friends posted on Facebook, “This is so Cubs….”

Because it was. When the arm-weary Aroldis Chapman, the half-season rental whom the Cubs acquired during the summer for the sole purpose of pitching the late innings of a World Series, allowed a home run to tie the score in the eighth inning, it seemed as though the ghosts that had haunted Cubs teams of the past had taken roost in the rafters in Cleveland: the black cat at Shea Stadium in 1969, Leon Durham fumbling the ground ball behind Rick Sutcliffe in 1984, and even the tragic Steve Bartman, who lives in body but whose tortured spirit has never allowed him to return to Cubs fandom. It seemed then that the “Cuban Missile,” as Chapman was known when he arrived in baseball, had detonated in the midst of them all. The blast radius would have consumed the entire Midwest.

Then the skies opened. “Raining….Tears of all the Cubs fans in heaven,” wrote my would-be aunt on Facebook. Her donut shop, Donut Delite, had opened at 4:30 a.m. on game days to sell elongated donuts with white icing, blue sprinkles and the Cubs “C” piped on in red in the middle.

But we kept watching, kept cheering, kept rubbing the talismans, even as the game went into extra innings and the rain continued to pour. My brother, my cousin Olivia, my uncles Andy and Larry and I kept a group text going all night. “I think I may have a heart attack,” Olivia texted as the 10th inning opened.

So, when Mike Montgomery, a supporting character who never imagined he would be called upon to execute such a momentous task, recorded his first career save by securing the final out in the bottom of the 10th, and we realized that we had won? The ground shook from millions of Cubs fans across the country leaping off of bar stools and couches and jumping up and down and hugging. And, yeah, crying.

The reality of finally winning something, finally having generations of hope and faith validated, took a while to sink in.

“It is still unreal,” my uncle Andy texted us again from western Illinois on Friday morning. “What a miracle. [Cubs Owner Thomas] Ricketts, Theo [Epstein, Cubs general manager], 5 years….And in our lifetime! We are all blessed. Enjoy, baby!”

A good thing happened. In our lifetime. And now, “Wait `til next year” isn’t an expression of stubborn hope in the face of a crushing legacy. Now, “Wait `til next year” means that the summer of 2017 will bring the chance for the Chicago Cubs to pursue back-to-back World Series championships. Just like they did 108 years ago. Maybe good things happening can become the new tradition.

That’s a belief worth hanging on to.