jakehurwitz:

Full disclosure: When the Red Sox came back from 3 games down to beat the Yankees in the ALCS in 2004 I’m one of the people who didn’t get out of bed the next day. I’m not lying.

Some of my best memories from college involve playoff baseball.

I rioted with half of ISU’s student body when the Cubs beat the Braves to advance to the NLCS in 2003. The local police are still probably grateful it happened on a Sunday night when everyone was hungover from the weekend.

I transferred to Columbia and moved to Chicago in 2004. One of my four roommates was from Cambridge, Mass., and, naturally, a lifelong Red Sox fan. He was usually pretty quiet and shy. Another was from Rochester, N.Y., and an obnoxious Yankees fan of the worst variety. The other two were lifelong White Sox fans. There was copious amounts of American League shit-talking throughout the playoffs, but it reached epic proportions when the Yankees went up three games to none in the World Series.

Yankees this, Yankees that. Boston sucks. Yankees Fan Roommate never shut up.

But he got progressively quieter as the Red Sox turned things around. He couldn’t even watch Game 7 at the apartment. He watched it in neutral territory at a bar, and didn’t come back for two days after the Yanks lost.

Mr. Boston and Mr. New York were gone in 2005, leaving the White Sox fan roommates and to I party with thousands of South Siders outside Comiskey in a cold October rain after the Sox swept the Astros for the Series. We took a backpack full of beer with down with us, but most of it ended up showered everywhere as we celebrated locker room-style on the L ride to the stadium.

I may be a roommateless college grad now, but who knows what this October will bring. And with the Cubs and White Sox both in first place heading into September, the weather must be getting kind of chilly down in Hell, as a Cubs-Sox World Series doesn’t seem all that insane anymore.