Thanks, Cubs, for a great year as the champions.

It’s the middle of the fourth inning in game five of the series between the Cubs and the Dodgers. It’s a game where, if the Cubs won, they would prolong their season another day, and where if the Dodgers won, they would be heading to the 2017 World Series.

It’s 9-0 Los Angeles right now, after it was 3-0 early, which ushered the early departure of Cubs starter Quintana in the 2nd, which was subsequently greeted by a Kike Hernandez grand slam (his second homer of three on the night).

It happens.

One year you are World Champion. The next year, you get blown out in the playoffs. It is disheartening to experience, if too much of you, the fan, is wrapped up in it. The winning, the losing.

But win or loss, whether the Cubs stay around for another game or their season is ended tonight, life still goes on.

It’s just another distraction you enjoyed that is put away for now. For a while. For as long as you want.

Baseball is a game. A sport.

Each year, approximately 1300 men get to play for one of 30 times at the sport’s highest level in the United States. Beneath them, others toil on one of the rosters of 247 minor league teams sprinkled across the country. With 25-man rosters, that’s about 6200 other guys getting payed to play the game in America.

That’s about 7500 players that get to be paid to play baseball.

I’m a fan. I buy the jerseys and caps and other goodies that represent the team I love, and I watch my team religiously, ingesting commercial after commercial by their advertisers. My money and TV time and souvenir purchases turn into revenue for the ballclubs I watch, and for the MLB players, and for their farm systems. I’m one of millions who do this. We watch and have a stake in this chosen club winning for some reason. We get wrapped up knowing about the players, and the stadiums, and the coaches, and the statistics, and ultimately, the schedules and their results- but every year it always comes down to a few weeks in October.

Only one team can be the champions.

And if my team happens to be it, I buy more of their stuff that I can wear, that broadcasts my allegiance to them- the team that won the championship that year.

A team that doesn’t know I am alive- or really even feel or relish my fanaticism.

I can turn the games off after the long campaign and whether “my team” is the winner or loser, I am left in its wake in a silence and an awareness that I am still here, having to make decisions about what I want to do with my life. What challenges or fears I want to face. What problems I want to solve. What goals I want to accomplish.

In short, I am still left facing the questions everyone has to answer about their lives: what do you want to do with it.

That, I suppose, for me, is the good part about the end of baseball season.

I am thrown back to having to face the trajectory of my life.

My commitment to watch the ballgames can no longer keep me from paying attention to my needs and my responsibilities as a human being.

I have to wake back up to living my life.

Thanks, Cubs, for an entertaining, enjoyable, escape of a 2017 season. I loved hanging with you all for the last 8 mnts.

I’ll pick it up from here.

For a while, at least.

I know that for you guys each year, there is only one champion.

I also recognize that for me, each year, over the years, I only get to live one life.

Time to quiet things down.

—

The Dodgers beat the Cubs this evening 11-1 to advance to the 2017 World Series. The Cubs begin their offseason.