The Curse Is Reversed: The Red Sox Win It All

For 86 years, Boston fans had watched everyone else celebrate. On October 27, 2004, their turn finally came.

The wound went back to 1920, when Red Sox owner Harry Frazee sold the great Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees. Before the sale, Boston had won five championships and the Yankees had won none. After it, Boston's well ran dry while the Yankees piled up title after title. Fans gave the drought a name — the Curse of the Bambino — and the curse kept finding new ways to torment them.

In 1946, Boston was two outs from the title when Enos Slaughter scored all the way from first base on a single while shortstop Johnny Pesky held the ball a fatal second too long. In 1978, light-hitting Yankees shortstop Bucky Dent lofted a home run over Fenway's Green Monster to steal the pennant. In 1986, with Boston one out from the championship, a ground ball rolled through first baseman Bill Buckner's legs. Every October seemed to invent a fresh heartbreak.

Then came October 2004. The Red Sox had clawed into the playoffs as the wild card and found themselves down three games to none against — of all teams — the Yankees in the American League Championship Series. No team in baseball history had ever come back from 0-3 in a best-of-seven series. Boston won Game 4 in extra innings on David Ortiz's walk-off homer, won Game 5 in fourteen innings, took Game 6 behind Curt Schilling's now-legendary bloody-sock performance on an injured ankle, and crushed the Yankees in Game 7. The greatest comeback in baseball history was complete.

The World Series, against the St. Louis Cardinals — who had the best regular-season record in baseball — felt almost like an afterthought. It wasn't. Boston won the first three games, and on the night of October 27, at Busch Stadium in St. Louis, Derek Lowe shut the Cardinals down in a 3-0 Game 4 clincher. When Edgar Renteria — wearing number 3, Babe Ruth's old number — grounded out to end it, the Red Sox had swept the Series in four straight games. Their first championship since 1918. Manny Ramirez was named the Series MVP, and general manager Theo Epstein told reporters, "This is for anyone who has ever rooted for the Red Sox. This is for all of Red Sox Nation, past and present."

Back in Boston, hundreds of thousands of fans poured into the streets. The celebration had an edge of disbelief to it — people who had waited their whole lives, whose parents and grandparents had waited too, suddenly didn't know what to do with joy. The 2004 team even made Boston the first city since Pittsburgh in 1979 to hold the Super Bowl and World Series titles in the same year, thanks to the Patriots.

Curses are superstition, of course. But they are also stories a city tells about itself — and on October 27, 2004, Boston finally got to tell a different one. The Bambino was forgiven. The drought was over. And Red Sox Nation, the most famously long-suffering fan base in American sports, learned what the rest of the country already knew: what it feels like to win.

Image: Fenway Park at night during a game, the stadium packed with fans under the lights, photographed by James, CC BY 2.0 (via Wikimedia Commons).