In a lot of ways, Game 7 was an easy game to write.
You had the Chicago Cubs ending a 108-year drought with an extra-inning road victory at Cleveland (another long-suffering team). There were endless storylines within the game. You become a sports writer to write stories from games like that.
But it's so easy it can be hard.
Because you know you're not just writing for the web, or for the next day's paper. You're writing for the history books. You're writing the lede in the story that people will keep, will remember forever. Like Gammons with Game 6 in 1975. Red Smith in 1951. I remember feeling that on a local level when both St. Bonaventure and Binghamton made the NCAA Tournament. Now imagine that on a national level, with the Cubs.
Well, David Waldstein, Benjamin Hoffman and Victor Mather crushed it in the New York Times. Absolutely crushed it. It's as good a lede as you will ever, ever read:
CLEVELAND — Throughout more than a century of baseball in America, where teams have risen to championship heights and fallen to miserable lows several times over, and where cities have lost teams, gained them and lost them again, there was always the Chicago Cubs and their futility.
Sometimes the Cubs were good. More often they were just bad. But since 1908, they had not done what so many other teams had, not even through fluke or plain luck.
The United States fought two world wars, the Soviet Union grew to dominance and then imploded, diseases were wiped off the earth and technology took us from newfangled automobiles to moon rockets and beyond — and still the Cubs could not win a World Series.
Their fans trudged in and out of Wrigley Field thousands of times over the years and came to believe the team was cursed.
But 2016 was the 108th year after their last title, and a baseball is sewn together with 108 stitches. This had to be the year.
It was.
Our jobs, as sports writers, is to capture the essence of the moment. They did that perfectly.
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