It was during summer in ’98, even before I picked up my somewhat ordered life and threw it 1300 miles east at that huge Midwestern metropolis, that I had started to pay attention to them.

Maybe it was because they were often on WGN, filling afternoon and evening time slots on the national cable channel, and Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire were causing a stir hitting home runs.

Maybe it was because they just had a knack for losing, except that year. I heard about them, and it was pretty positive.

Maybe it was because they were the baseball team from that town- that mystical, mythical city I had decided held my future at the time.

Or maybe it was because, before I packed my life into my little white Toyota truck and left the desert behind me, they played a series with the fledgling Arizona Diamondbacks that was on the radio in the evenings, filling my mind as I packed for the move.

I don’t know.

Once the move was behind me and Chicago exploded around me, I was there. Anticipating getting married, I was living in an apartment on the north side of the city a dozen or so blocks from Clark and Addison, and from that shrine to classic American ballparks. It was late summer, and as heat and humidity settled over each Saturday and Sunday afternoon, the neighborhoods in the Lake View area frequently filled with cars and people walking five and seven and nine blocks to the Friendly Confines. Amidst the hustle of fans and the hum of cars coming and going, I soon learned to appreciate Pat Hughes starting each radio ballgame broadcast with his signature “Chicago Cubs baseball is on the air!” Little did I know that Pat and Ron Santo and I would become pretty good friends over the ext few years.

Chicago began as a wonderland for me. It was a grand daddy of a city with perpetual lights and big buildings and history and lore around every corner and daily seas of nicely dressed and serious people heading, on foot, by train, and in cars, to important destinations everywhere. The marble and steel and glass downtown dazzled me, while the multi-leveled walkups shaded out front by lines of trees reminded me I was out of the Southwest, away from adobe abodes and rock-scaped front yards.

As I started adjusting to the speed and weight of life in my new world, the Cubs became an active backdrop to my daily activities.

I ended up taking a job that was an hour and some away from my new home, out in the west suburbs, and on some of the evenings coming home, the Eisenhower Freeway coming home became a drive-thru for 40 miles, which lent the time to Cubs games.

As Michelle and I navigated pre-marriage and then entered married life, “we” remained “her” and “I” for a long two years, and in the tumult of trying to find our relationship and then ultimately accepting its loss, I spent a lot of hours alone, either trying to find answers to questions in my heart, or trying to find questions for the answers I was in. I walked a lot. And a common friend on those walks was my little AM/FM Walkman Radio. And Pat and Ron.

After two-ish years, an old high school friend of mine that lived in the Chicagoland area graciously came to the apartment where Michelle and I lived and, on a snowy day in the first week of January, 2001, helped me move my meager belongings and my beaten heart out of the marriage and into a small studio several blocks away. On emotional life support, I completed that winter silently riding the bus and train to work downtown each workday, and at night coming home to an empty, furniture-free room.

It was with the appearance of buds on trees and the broadcast of Spring Training games on the radio that my heart tried to wake up again.

For another two years, I remained a resident in that studio, where I slept on the floor on an unframed futon mattress and endured the intermittent heat of an unadjustable steam radiator in cold months and the warm moist breath of summer coming in the room’s windows on summer nights. I had barely any material possessions at that time, and had even lost my truck a year prior due to the effects of winter on a car left unused for months on an icy, salty, snowy street. With no TV and lots of time alone, I listened to WGN a lot, and in the warm periods, walked around the city after work, or jogged on the lake front paths.

And I got accustomed to the names.

Glenallen Hill. Sosa. Steve Trachsel. Jon Lieber. Kerry Wood. Joe Girardi. Corey Patterson. Mark Guthrie. Coomer, Hundley, Zambrano, Matt Stairs. Joe Borowski-a favorite. And the start of my Golden Age as a Cubs fan: Clement, Farnsworth, Prior, Fassero. Alex Gonzalez, Mark Bellhorn. Moises Alou. Clement, Wellemeyer. Grudzielanek, Glanville, Lofton. And in 2004, the arrival of Derrek Lee along with Garciaparra and John Leicester and the return of Greg Maddux, despite a season-end collapse.

I don’t know how many games I listened to between 1998 and 2003. I do know, however, through one of the loneliest eras of my life, I seemed to always have Pat and Ron nearby, giving me a little life and including me in that big family around Cubs baseball.

I actually didn’t go to many games while I was in Chicago. I couldn’t really afford to very often. I did, however, get to a game late in the summer of 1998, when Sosa and McGwire were racing for the home run record. I got to probably 3 or 4 more in the following years, when the Cubs were bottom-dwellers in the National League Central. Still, they were family.

And then Ramirez, Lee, Wood, Prior, Leicester, Zambrano, Clement, and Marmol happen. Years I look back on with great affection.

That’s how, for me, the Cubs became the greatest team in baseball.

A bond brokered through loneliness and losses. A bond forged by futility and fraternity.

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Image Credit: Wrigley Field Panorama by Roger Smith via Flickr. Creative Commons license.