Cubs fans who remember '69, '84, '03 and a bunch of other years know that everything falls apart really fast, or really slow, or maybe at some in-
between speed; but no matter how fast it happens, sooner or later it falls apart. Death, taxes and the Cubs falling apart: The three inescapable certainties. The one constant in a Cubs fan's universe, besides Ernie Banks' unflappable good cheer, is that everything put together sooner or later falls apart. They will fall apart this year, next year, every year.
Yet you hold on to optimism in the face of guaranteed entropy because you're a Cubs fan. Who needs God or the Book of Job or Sisyphus or justice or philosophy or the Second Law of Thermodynamics when you're a Cubs fan? Even though the Cubs are the oldest team in baseball, even though the Cubs are one of only two remaining charter members of the National League, even though the team has played in the same city for the most years running (except the two seasons they couldn't play there because of the Great Chicago Fire), even though the team won two World Series championships and 16 pennants, and even though the Cubs are all this and more, no one living today can remember the Cubs' last World Series victory in 1908. And only people 68 years old or older were born at the time the Cubs last won the National League pennant in 1945.
Yet you just know that next year will be different.
That's despite what you learned on your grandpa's knee: That something bad always is lurking on the horizon, ready to pounce -- maybe not during this inning, maybe not during this game, maybe not this week, maybe not this month, but certainly before October. You expect it. You know it's coming. You brace yourself. You refuse to get false hopes up. Yet when the inevitable happens, you're shocked and disappointed and mystified all over again.
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In your grief and despair, you promise never to put yourself through this again. Never. You'll switch loyalties to another team or another sport. You'll take up bird-watching or start watching "Breaking Bad." But you're frozen, unable to muster up the quantum of energy necessary to leap into another realm. You're immobilized by an unbearable sense of loss. Every single time. Yet every single time you pull yourself up, dust off the despair and slather on a new layer of hope.
Next year will be different.
And it will. Because you're a Cubs fan.
Laura Erickson of Duluth is an author and radio producer who has loved both birds and the Chicago Cubs for as long as she can remember.
