Where Were You?

Just want to throw this out to everyone. Where were you on October 27, 2004 (and if you need to ask the significance of that date, you're probably on the wrong message board).

I was in a meeting until 6PM when my boss looked at me and I had both legs bouncing up and down in the chair I was sitting in. He laughed and said, "leave, see you tomorrow afternoon."

I watched the game at the Baseball Tavern. I'll never forget walking by the Boston Beer Works about 6:15 and they already had a line, my buddy and I just strolled into the BBT and grabbed a seat at the bar. With one out in the ninth about half the TVs in the place went out, they almost had a riot.

We went to the BBT because the year before we had watched Game X (as my buddy christened it) there and we felt that in keeping with the theme of "no curse" we had to return to the same place to watch the game. We sat on the other side of the bar though.

Home, because I'm old, and a loser, and, like my dad, I now find I prefer to be left alone so I can pay attention. Had a bottle of Chimay Reserve in the fridge, and drink it like it was champagne as the game neared its end.

At Busch Stadium in St. Louis, MO. One of the most surreal feelings I've experienced. The funny thing was as my Dad and I were on the sidewalk at 3:00 am, Cardinals fans were driving by beeping their horns at us yelling, "Congratulations!" and things like that. That is just NOT NORMAL. That would never happen in Boston if we had been in their shoes!

At home with my 16-year-old son holding hands. same place as for all three Pats Super Bowls.

Mark, sounds cool, that would never happen here.

in a bar in Denver, Colorado, that was absolutely packed with loud, drunk Red Sox fans.... don't ask me how.
there were only about 12 people there for the first pitch, but then it just kept filling up.
there were 2 guys at the end of the bar, 2 of the original 12, guys I'd never met before, who were absolutely terrified the Sox were going to blow it... I mean Afraid To Look At the Screen terrified, afraid to enjoy themselves, totally 100 percent sure the Sox couldn't win.

I was skeptical when the game started, especially with Lowe pitching...... it's still hard to believe or describe to this day, but when Damon hit the leadoff homer, I KNEW it was over.
a strange sense of calm..... no way they're losing this game.... the Cardinals were done.... you could see it on their faces and in their body language.

I'm trying to tell these 2 guys to lighten up and enjoy it but they wouldn't.... and they came by during every commercial break for the rest of the night to see if I was "still sure."
It wasn't that they thought I knew anything, just that these guys couldn't fathom that a fellow Sox fan wasn't sweating bullets watching this.
even as Foulke took the mound for the 9th, these guys were absolutely POSITIVE St Louis was gonna rally and win the game.

so on the final out, these guys finally let loose and start screaming and hugging each other.
then they're hugging everyone around them.
then everyone's hugging everyone who's nearby.
somehow about 20 bottles of champagne appear and people are popping the corks, spraying champagne, yelling and hugging, just like in the locker room.

we'd really accomplished nothing (the players had) and most of us didn't even know each other...
and I've never seen any of those people since.
but that was a great night.

never thought I'd find that kind of feeling in Colorado, but I did.

ADD, that's incredible. By which I mean the part where you had passionate people around you in Colorado is unbelievable. That's like the most laid-back state I've ever heard of. I went to visit a friend who was staying out there for a few months. He was from Jersey, but had been enjoying it out there, and invited me to come visit for a week.

So one night we went to a bar to try to catch some music. And there's like this interminable wait between bands. And the band we were waiting for wasn't Pearl Jam or anything, OK? Just some band that was on next. We also might have been under the influence. So eventually some guys go up on stage and start playing some kind of background music, no vocals or anything. And then we see this intentially goofy-looking guy skulking his way through the crowd. Just kind of looking weird and acting all campy but definitely not singing. And this went on for what seemed like ten minutes; again, we were under the influence of some stuff there, but this guy really was taking forever. So we started booing him. Kind of good-naturedly, but you know, our buzzes were finite in duration, and we wanted to hear some music. Well, the Boulderites around us looked horrified. A couple told us, "Give them a chance, man." I'm not doing this story justice, because tomorrow my head will hurt, Chimp Style, but we just wrote it off to culture gap and got the hell out of there. My friend moved back to Jersey a couple of weeks later.

Ok, maybe I should stick to sober posting ...

Myself and about 15 of my friends were in the biggest dorm room any of us had bunched around a TV. We had watched Game 4 of the ALCS there, and hadn't budged since then. I'm not a superstitous man, but I became one for the rest of the playoffs. The list of things we did:

- In Game 4, my friend (out of frustration) threw a tennis ball into his bathroom as hard as he could. We waited for it to bounce back, but it didn't. We looked, and it had somehow wedged itself into a space none of us knew ever existed. It stayed there for the rest of the playoffs.

- My friend, in an attempt to inspire Kevin Millar, played the song that he came up to bat to at Fenway - "I Stand Alone" by Godsmack, a truly awful song. However, he got a hit. After that, Millar's song was played every time he came to bat.

- And this is the truly ridiculous one. We were so tense that when we started scoring runs in Game 4, we played the song "Zombie Nation" (the one almost every hockey team plays when they score a goal) and danced around the couch sitting in the middle of the room. We did that dance every time the Red Sox scored a run for the rest of the playoffs. We entitled it "The Warpath", and more and more people kept joining us for our ritual every game. We never lost a game where we warpathed, so I suppose it worked. None of these traditions were ever used again - they were a one-time thing. Still, very weird.

Anyways, after we won both the ALCS and the World Series, we had the same sequence. We jumped up and down in celebration for a while, then ran outside and found the largest gathering of Holy Cross students. A few kids set up their band and played Dirty Water, people burned Yankees hats, beer was floating around everywhere, and campus police just looked on, knowing there was absolutely nothing that they could do to stop what was happening (not that they'd want to - I'm sure they were Sox fans too). Great times.

I remember every single pitch of the 2004 playoffs, yet October 27 was almost a blur. I started writing out all of my favorite memories of that wonderful Wednesday night, but I do have to say that one of the highlights was calling Mark Citrone on his cell phone in St. Louis and having a 15-second conversation in which neither one of us had the faintest idea of what the other said (yet we were both 100% stone sober).

Also, to build off of Rev's point, many of my friends had grown sour on Mark Bellhorn for his pitiful playoff performance, so during Game 6 before his at-bat against Lieber, I jokingly told a friend of mine to go do something productive in the hopes that Bellhorn would reciprocate. My friend changed his laundry - Bellhorn hit the home run. Of course, in every at-bat thereafter, my friend would do situps, brush his teeth, read a book, etc. Classic stuff.

Craig will vouch for me on this one, Bellhorn was BY FAR my favorite member of the Red Sox during the 2004 season. I was so incredibly happy when we got him from Colorado. He was easily one of the most productive 2B in the game that year. When he went yard off Julian Tavarez in the 8th of WS Game 1, I've never hugged so many random strangers at Fenway in my life.

Mark just scored about 10,000 points in my book. He was my favorite guy on that 2004 team as well - I still wear my Bellhorn shirt with pride. It gets lost in all the heroics, but Bellhorn was arguably the third most valuable member of that postseason squad behind Ortiz and Foulke. How many other people can say they hit HR's in three straight playoff games, with two of them being the game winners? An absolutely phenomenal stretch by Bellhorn, and one that really does get ignored by far too many people. The sound his ball made off the Pole on that Tavarez-allowed HR was like the bell in the Old North Church going off.