After it happened, I keep thinking about how these words of Jawaharlal Nehru might be applied to the Red Sox Nation:

Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, [this nation] will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance....

At the dawn of history [this nation] started on her unending quest, and trackless centuries are filled with her striving and the grandeur of her successes, and her failures. Through good and ill fortune alike she has never lost sight of that quest or forgotten the ideals which gave her strength. We end today a period of ill fortune and [this nation] discovers herself again. The achievement we celebrate today is but a step, an opening of opportunity, to the greater triumphs and achievements that await us. Are we brave enough and wise enough to grasp this opportunity and accept the challenge of the future?

Freedom and power bring responsibility.... Before the birth of freedom, we have endured all the pains of labour and our hearts are heavy with the memory of this sorrow. Some of those pains continue even now. Nevertheless, the past is over and it is the future that beckons to us now. That future is not one of ease or resting but of incessant striving so that we might fulfil the pledges we have so often taken and the one we shall take today....

And so we have to labour and to work and work hard to give reality to our dreams. Those dreams are for [our nation], but they are also for the world, for all the nations and peoples are too closely knit together today for any one of them to imagine that it can live apart. Peace has been said to be indivisible; so is freedom, so is prosperity now, and so also is disaster in this one world that can no longer be split into isolated fragments.

On my bookshelf -- along with foul balls from Candlestick Park and the Oakland Coliseum (where I saw the Sox go behind two games to none last year, then come back to win in three straight -- only to lose the pennant to the Yankees in seven games) -- is a fair ball off the bat of Rick Burleson that I caught for a ground-rule double one fine Sunday afternoon at Yankee Stadium, 17 September 1978. I can still see it kicking up the dust just inside the foul line, and spinning softly up into my hands on that one bounce, just before the charging Yankee right fielder could cut it off. And I still remember the beauty of Dennis Eckersley's starting and winning pitching that day. Ten days earlier, my brother and I had waited four hours in the bleacher ticket line to see the first game of the Boston Massacre in the teams' previous series at Fenway Park, and it was so sweet to see the Red Sox start to come back. I may be biased, but I think that was the last time before this week that the Red Sox won such a crucial game against the Yankees: the next time they met was in the one-game playoff the Red Sox lost at Fenway on 1 October 1978.

Today is the first anniversary of my launch of this blog. I was hoping to have something celebratory to say, but I think I have enough to celebrate already tonight. And if the World Series goes to seven games, the finale will be on my mother's birthday: Halloween night. With my father, she sat through the Red Sox' loss to the Cardinals in the seventh game of the 1967 World Series at Fenway. Here's hoping this birthday gives her something extra to celebrate.