SO. CARDS VERSUS SOX: With St. Louis getting to Roger Clemens in the 5th--or 6th? around then--and pulling away from Houston in an okay game that I watched but was never really into, having missed most of it for the much more readily accessible drama of the Sox-Yankees series. It's easier for non-baseball fans like me to get into Sox-Yankees, or Sox-Anybody, or (like last year) Cubs-Anybody, or Yankees-Anybody, because there's all this inherent drama to these older teams with reputations for pure evil or pure poor lovable patheticity. Sox-Cardinals has quite bit of inherent drama to it (and I remember Bob Ryan saying something recently about St. Louis and Boston being the last two true baseball cities, so the fans will be amped. Did you notice somebody beating a drum in the background at Fenway? It was like a soccer crowd) though not as much as the Sox-Cubs series that never happened last year would have had. And one wonders if the idiots will suffer a letdown against the Cardinals, just because totally crushing and humiliating the Yankees happens once in a lifetime, and is in that sense a much greater achievement than a World Series that happens every year. I dunno. Certainly the Yankees had nothing left after last year's ALCS. There may be more of a viewing audience letdown--again, the same as last year--as no series could compare to this ALCS and that ALCS. No other series could have that history, except--again--Cubs-Sox. It's a drama two years in the making that finally ended in the most improbable way possible and I'm thinking an at least partially anticlimatic World Series is inevitable. But at least it's not the Sox vs. a McFranchise.

Anyway. The Curse has not been lifted yet, but maybe the Sox came up with something better than the Curse: a three loss in a row, four win in a row ALCS that had never ever happened before, and happened against baseball's most storied franchise at the hands of one of its more pathetic ones. Not that that will make up for another Bill Buckner moment if it happens, but this has to feel so good to Boston fans right now.