I keep having this recurring nightmare

There's 1 out in the bottom of the 8th inning of game 7 of the ALCS... the Red Sox are winning 5 to 2. The bleepin' New York Yankees are starting to string together a rally against Pedro Martinez. Runners are on first and third. Grady Little comes out of the dugout to apparently pull Pedro from the game. Since there is surely a commercial break on the horizon, I get up and go to the kitchen to get myself another beer. When I come back out, lo and behold the game is still on. I am beside myself. What happened? Why didn't he pull Pedro? This is when things get hazy and I black out. Somewhere in there some items got thrown and I power-vomited. It wasn't pretty.

What's worse is that it wasn't a nightmare. It really happened. I remember my friend Brian ticking off the outs one at a time on a napkin and telling him that it wasn't a good idea. You see, he was new to being a Red Sox fan and had not been subjected to the abject pain that the rest of us have been forced to endure. As a matter of fact, when the game was over, he calmly said "Aren't you happy about how well they did this year?". The rest of us just sneered at him. I think from a baseball standpoint we've poisoned him forever now. Innocence lost.

Is it wrong that 10 months later this still vexes me? I swear, sometimes when I'm in the car, say I'm driving to work or something, I get a sudden case of Tourette's syndrome thinking about that sequence of events from October. I still wanna yell out "Pull him Grady! Take him out!" and put my fist through the dashboard, but to no avail. I mean, what was he thinking? That Red Sox bullpen was automatic in the playoffs. You couldn't score a run off of them. So in the biggest game of the season with a trip to the World Series on the line, he decides to save Mike Timlin for what? Game 1 of the World Series? Ended up saving him for spring training instead. Ugh. And the thing is, it's almost playoff time for the season we're currently in, and I'm still upset about it.

But of course, this is the road we Red Sox fans are forced to hoe. They say that women live an average of 7 years longer than men. Well, I've got to imagine that Yankees fans live an average of 7 years longer than Red Sox fans. With all the stress we have to deal with, how can it not be so? They lead a pretty privileged existence while we have to figure out when the guillotine is going to drop. Because games like those do add up over time. I'm at least grateful that I was 10 years old and was sound asleep well before Buckner booted that one in '86.

Another statistic I've heard is that for every cigarette that one smokes, 7 minutes is taken off of that person's lifespan. And that doesn't even include the 7 or so minutes spent smoking it in the first place. So, in other words, I can't get those 3-plus hours back that I spent watching the game, and on top of that I've also got to deal with the loss of about a year of my life due to the resulting trauma. That game gave me dry heaves. I'm not kidding. The combination of beer, fried snacks, and the big sinking feeling had me on the bathroom floor making a call on the porcelain telephone.

My wife thinks I'm a big wierdo because of that. She kept asking what the hell was the matter with me. Of course, as a lifelong Sox fan herself, she was devastated too. We banded together though and decided the best course of action was to go out and get a puppy to cheer us up... a miniature female dachshund that we named "Fenway" Frankie. Isn't that sick? I need help.

But hey, whatever it takes to cope right?

Damn, stupid Grady Little. When will the torment end?