The Hanover Collaboration

Somewhere between Absolute Clubhouse and Game On, they materialized out of the mob, like some phishing scheme come surreally to life. Except this time, the Nigerian millions were real.

“Are you two alone? Or are you meeting people inside?” one asked.

“Uh…”

Seconds earlier, Game On’s line wrangler had promised swift and brutal relegation to anyone allowing people to cut.

“Would you rather go to the game?” they continued.

Bella almost said “no”, but by then the tickets were out.

“Take them. Go as a guest of the studio.”

By this point I had them in my hands. Sure enough, the back of the ticket was stamped “COURTESY OF FOX”. The man handing them out seemed bona fide enough, with his sport coat, walkie-talkie and lap-dog looking intern.

“Oh, no way” said a girl behind us in line.

It could still be a scam. Would finding out be worth the 45 minutes we’d already invested in line? To ask the question is to know the answer, and seconds later, we were certifiably the luckiest pair of the 38,805 on hand for ALCS Game 7.

The tickets said $95, but lord only knows what they were actually worth. Why hadn’t Fox just scalped them? Probably some sort of contractual obligation – or as atonement to Red Sox fans for producing Fever Pitch. I guess it could also be general karma restoration for foisting Fox News upon the world.

Every game at Fenway since god knows when has been sold out, but on this night, the stadium felt the full weight of a (probably well above) capacity crowd. Every sub-code, Wilson-era doorway, ramp and staircase slowed progress two a crawl. Beer lines were immense – probably because no one had intentions of missing even a second of what promised to be the sensational end to an exciting series.

We got to our seats just as a local girls’ dance troupe was finishing up its routine (the first of about 30 times we’d hear “Shipping Up to Boston”), and from there it was pretty much non-stop mayhem until the first pitch. Even though Row 15 is waaaay back there in the Grandstands, the seats still weren’t bad, and the rowdy and talkative SROers just behind us more than made up the the loss of the jumbotron.

First three innings were insane. Stand up and shout. Sit. Base hit. Stand up and shout. New batter, stand and shout, then sit down. Two strikes, stand and shout. Etc. It was like some bizarre Catholic megachurch, and considering all the praying that’s gone on in Fenway over the years, a kneeler wouldn’t have been out of place. Dice-K was near-perfect through two outs in the third inning, and the fans were really giving it to a struggling Westbrook.

“Weeeeeest-Broooook. Weeeeest-Broooook”

As the game went on, though, Matsuzaka got sloppier, Westbrook tightened down, and the score got closer. While on a bathroom/beer/panini break in the 4th, there was palpable tension, with fans (or rather, the few full-bladdered or empty-bellied enough to be pulled away from the game) and servers alike glued to the TVs as they watched struggling Red Sox starter. For a while, the game became a duel of inning-ending double-plays.

Okajima came in for relief in the 6th, protecting a razor-thin Sox lead. While there was plenty of shouting and screaming later in the night, for pure, jubilant explosion, it was hard to beat the crowd’s reaction to the almost-didn’t-get-it double-play that lead into the 7th inning stretch.

From there on out, though, the game was pretty much a party. In the bottom of the seventh, the fans got to watch Julio Lugo sac bunt, which is such a double bonus. Pedroia made it all a moot point at the next at-bat, and it was damn cool to watch the entire grandstand crane awkwardly forward to try and catch the last little bit of his homer as it bounced off the top of the Monster.

Okajima kicked off the 8th with two consecutive base hits, but all nervousness was allayed as the the Fenway sound system boomed out the first rumbling strains of “Wild Thing”. Between Papelbon’s 98 mph cheese and Youk’s Off-The-Coke-Bottles homer (which I could see none of, I might add) the crowd was certain of a win, and chanting “hey hey, goodbye” before the the 9th inning even began.

“...good times never seemed so good.”

I’ve read far too many Greek myths (and seen far too many Red Sox games) to engage in such hubris, and top of the 9th was about as nervous as any well-padded three outs can be. The Sox pulled Manny, bumped Ellsbury to left and put Coco Crisp in center, and not a second too soon – the inning’s first and last outs were pretty exceptional catches on hard-hit flies. Brayt called during the game’s final batter and got a decent audio picture of the final 15 seconds, probably just ahead of the TV delay.

Afterwards, there was a few minutes of unrestrained celebration and a wicked lot of camera phones, followed by the slow, trickling departure of those fans still concerned with catching the T. A decent sized crowd hung around to watch Papelbon pour beer on the AL Eagle and dance jigs, while Ortiz made up for a pretty lackluster performance by pumping the crowd, starting a wave and telling the fans how awesome they are.

Things started to settle down, the players went back inside, and so we left, passing two cops in riot gear at the doorway on our way out. The streets had pretty much cleared, but I still had to talk my way past two lines of cops on Comm Ave to get back to my bike. No one got shot, which was nice, and the crowds seemed well behaved, minus a tossed bottle or two. Then the Sox went on to sweep the World Series, and, to be honest, it seemed like a far, far less exciting couple of games.