…But now they only bring fatigue
To the home of the brave
The land of the free
And the doormat of the National League!

— Steve Goodman, “A Dying Cubs Fan’s Last Request”

I love baseball — it’s my favorite sport to watch, to play, and to simply take in the atmosphere. But unfortunately, I’ve been cursed with loving one of the most unfortunate of teams in baseball, the Chicago Cubs. Over the past week I’ve had to deal with the agony of watching the Cubs choke for the second straight year in the first round of the postseason. It hurt. It hurt real bad. Instead of going over every masochistic detail about why the Cubs decided to not show up in October, I instead will talk about that sarcastic, burning question that has been posed to me by White Sox and Cards fans alike: “Why am I a Cubs Fan?”

Why am I a Cubs fan? Why do I keep coming back, year after year after year … after year after year after year, when championships have eluded this team forever — far beyond the lifetime of nearly everyone who reads this blog (my dad was around – less than a year old – when the Cubs won the NL pennant in 1945)?

What the Cubs do for me, in an uncertain world where we may not know the outcomes of what we do in our daily lives (work, school, whatever), is provide some certainty. Whether or not I like the result of any particular game or season, the point is that there is a result. There is a finality — they win or lose, or in the case of a season, win a championship or go home and wait to try to redeem themselves in the next season (which has been the case for 101 years now). It allows me, by identifying with this team, to “live and die” with them during their ups and downs. I know you’ve all experienced these emotions and I don’t have to elaborate further.

When I first started following the Cubs, through the magic of being able to come home from school and watch them on TV every afternoon, one of the first things they did was lose 94 games.

That was in 1997. But I’m just a young fan. I’ve only read about the 1969 Cubs. I never lived the disappointment of the 1977, 1978 and 1979 teams, and through the terrible clubs of the early ’80s, before the triumph of 1984. I was only 2 years old during the 1989 NL East title. I first witnessed their prototypical fade from glory during the 1998 wild card and Slammin’ Sammy’s run at Henry Aaron’s record, only to be completely crushed during the playoffs. And let’s not even talk about the five-outs-short season of 2003. Since then, I’ve looked on like a kid with his nose pressed to the window glass while those guys in Boston scratched their 86-year itch. Twice. And I swallowed my pride as the Southside caravaned through the streets of Chicago clutching their World Series trophy. I just about died when the Cardinals won.

And I wonder: would it change the nature of what it is to be a Cub fan, to win it all? When the Cubs last won a World Series, my great grandparents were in their 30s, and none of my grandparents born yet. Generations of Cub fans have lived — and died — without experiencing the feeling of being the last ones standing at the end of a baseball season.

Would it change us, Cubs Fans? It might. It just might.

Damn, all I want is to find out how that feels. Hopefully, someday. Is it wrong for me to be so naive?