THE CURSE OF CURSES.(The Talk of the Town)

Baseball, the other great fall distraction, has removed itself from the stage with its customary clarity and dispatch, but not before revealing itself to be a Lab puppy at heart. The Boston Red Sox, after eighty-six years of dreary or spectacular failure, stand as Champions of the World; the Evil Empire and the St. Louis Cardinals and the Curse of the Bambino have been carried away, one after the other, dead as doornails; and the engrossing anxieties and preposterous turns of fortune that had run up cell-phone charges and damaged sleep up and down the land ever since September--Curt Schilling's sutured and seeping ankle, A-Rod's skulky hand-chop, "Who's Your Daddy?," and the certified greatest team comeback in history--are gone away, clearing our brains and restoring a vivifying boredom to breakfast. Non-fans can expect relief from the daily clutter of reference and nicknames and "how 'bout that"s, but even the loftiest of them must sense that this time around a professional sport produced something like a unifying jolt of happiness at the end, a national smile.

The Sox, all this while, have personified the rigorous and unbending difficulty of sport, and the grisly details of their ways of losing and the depths of their fans' suffering have been absorbed not just by eight- or nine-year-old boys and girls growing up in Brockton and Great Barrington but by the rest of us, smug at home on Schadenfreude Lane. Bucky Dent's homer in '78, Billy Buckner's muff in '86, Johnny Pesky holding onto the ball too long in '46, Aaron Boone's eleventh-inning shot into the left-field stands a year ago at Yankee Stadium--who could forget this, or who needed it, if you preferred to think that the Red Sox had not won a championship since 1918 because their owner, Harry Frazee, later sold away their great star, Babe Ruth, to the Yankees, and laid an evil spell on his club forever? "The Curse of the Bambino"--it was the title of a 1990 baseball book by the Globe's Dan Shaughnessy--was easy to make light of until this spring or early midseason, when adults found themselves being asked by otherwise reliable friends if they put stock in it or thought it would ever go away. Curt Schilling, the ace Sox starter, who won twenty-one games this season, said that he couldn't believe in the Curse because he was a Christian, but he answered the question in a different way when he beat the Yankees, in the critical sixth game of the American League championships, and then the St. Louis Cardinals, in the second game of the World Series, each time with a right ankle sutured (and resutured) to hold a damaged tendon in place. (His bloodied right sock, glimpsed in television closeups, was seen in reverent replication on the foot of a teen-aged ticket holder going into Fenway Park.)

The Red Sox comeback from a three-game deficit to the Yankees in the championship series was not just unprecedented in the sport but near-unbearable--a five-hour-and-two-minute fourth game, settled in the twelfth inning, was followed, the next day (the same day, actually), by a ...