It was a warm spring afternoon in Blacksburg long ago, and I was sitting in the apartment of future Irish whiskey and NAPA auto parts expert Tim Hogan. During our years at Virginia Tech, we had become good friends working together at campus radio station WUVT, and had bonded over sharing a lifelong addiction that had ruined many a life called “being a fan of Washington sports teams.”
On this June day in 1978, we were braced for pain. The Washington Bullets had buried the Seattle Supersonics at Caps Centre in Landover a few days prior in an NBA Championship series that had been contorted like a pretzel in order to bow down to the lords of television. It took 18 days to play this best of seven series, and today was day 18 that would decide the championship.
As fans of Washington sports teams, we not only suspected we’d lose the road game in Seattle, we expected it. Washington Coach Dick Motta had earlier uttered an iconic expression explaining that this Bullet team had the rare ability to come back in the face of mounting odds, saying “it ain’t over until the fat lady sings” every time they looked like they were very close to making the transition from basketball to off-season golf.
As we kidded about that day being the time an opera singer – who some might describe as “sturdy” – would be breaking into song, we talked about baseball. Tim was a baseball fan first, and while the Washington Senators had acted like a bad girlfriend, breaking your heart and then leaving more than once, his incredible dream was one day baseball would come back to the most powerful city in the world, and we’d both get to see a World Series game in Washington.
We also thought that after the Bullets did win that day and claimed their last NBA title, it was more likely Washington would win several more basketball championships than Washington ever playing in a World Series, much less that we would actually be there.
We were 21-year-old knuckleheads. We had the rest of our lives to wait for that to happen. Time was on our side. Why not?
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Fast forward to 2007. I’d left corporate life after determining I had met my quota for flying on airplanes not only for this lifetime, but the next five as well. I wanted to work in my own community and meet people where I lived instead of where I could fly to, so I took a job running a local radio station in Leesburg.
That station carried Washington Nationals games, and one day the Nats offered us all their old giveaways from previous promotions. It was useless to them because it had a sponsors’ name on it, and they needed room for new stuff. In my world, umbrellas, coolers, visors, et. al were still useful even if it did have a beer company logo on it. We gave it away as promotions of our own, but we ran into the same issue with the old advertising logos on them and they ended up being useless to us too.
So I started giving them away to anyone I knew (there’s still some in my basement all these years later). Also back at that time in 2007, I was just starting to try out this new social media platform called Twitter. It seemed to be a bunch of people saying boring things like “I’m sitting on the front porch,” but when live sporting events were on, it turned out to be fun to talk to other fans who were also watching. I ended up in many a conversation with fellow Nats fans, and we commiserated together as the team was working its way toward another 100-loss season.
One fan who sort of stood out to me was a single mother of two daughters, and she talked about taking her kids to Nats games all the time. Since it appeared she lived nearby in Ashburn, I DM’d her, assured her I was not some dangerous lurker (although I guess dangerous lurkers do say stuff like that), and said I had a box of Nats stuff her kids might like. If she wanted, I could meet her at the nearby Starbucks, introduce myself, and give her the package of goods.
She said yes, we met at Starbucks and we had a great conversation, where afterward I gave her the assortment of merchandise. I noticed she kept looking at her phone, and when I got back to my car, I logged on to Twitter to see if I had missed anything while in the coffee shop. Turns out she had been live tweeting the get-together with those Nats fans I was talking about, and the first thing I saw was a tweet saying “he’s NOT a stalker. He was very nice!”
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It’s now 2019. I had since become good friends with my fellow Nats Tweeter, and DM’d her to meet again at Starbucks. She’d been a longtime Nats season-ticket holder, so I wanted to ask her advice in finding tickets for my wife and I for the World Series.
After a few minutes, she slid two tickets across the table. She had 3, one for her and one for each of her two kids. They had a school conflict the night of the first game in DC and she offered them to me. She apologized that she had to charge more than face value, but named a fair price and said they’re mine if I want them.
“So wait,” I said. “instead of buying from a total stranger who will do Lord knows what with whatever extra profits he makes, I can buy from a friend, sit with her, and know that whatever I pay will go to the benefit of two kids I’ve watched grow up right before my eyes on Twitter?”
Deal.
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This all leads to what happened five years ago today. Tim came down to our seats to see us, we realized we had started talking about this when we were 21, and now we were old, gray and 63. We took pictures of everything to the point that with our seats being only a few rows from the railing separating the stands and left field, it was like we were saying “step into my office” as we took more and more pictures.
I don’t know how to describe an event where you’ve looked forward to it for over 40 years, and then it finally happens. People talk about special events and say stuff like “everyone was there,” but that night it seemed everyone you’d ever known who was a Washington sports fan WAS there. Old war stories were told. The atmosphere was electric. Seemed everything you observed was so much cooler because it was the World Freaking Series.
I realize that to some, it was just a baseball game, and for that matter, the home team didn’t win any of the three games in DC. But a few nights later, shortly after Howie Kendrick banged a home run off the right field foul pole in Houston, my phone rang. It was only a few minutes after midnight, and an aging Irishman seemed to be trying to imitate a large woman singing a brief aria.
The fat lady was singing. Not only had we been there to see the first game in DC in 100 years, but the Nats had won the World Series.
Everyone has good days and bad days in life, and it seems like we tend to remember the bad a bit more often than we do the good.
But not five years ago on this day, October 25, 2019.
THAT was a very, very good day.
