Meditations on a Championship

October 30, 2008.

The Philadelphia Phillies have won the World Series.

That is a sentence that has not been written for a long time. Well, twenty-five years, to be exact.

The Philadelphia Phillies. Have Won. The World Series.

Of all of the birthday gifts that I and my nephew, Vaughn, born on my 47th birthday, could have received, none are more thrilling.

I am sure that many in the country would not, could not, understand why this is such a big deal. But, you would have to have grown up in this Quaker city, which manifests an interesting mixture of passionate civic pride and self-effacement, to know why this is a seminal moment.

Philly has never been a look-at-us city. Perhaps this stems from the Quaker faith itself, an inward-looking religion wherein the "light within" is what guides its faithful, and the common experience of meeting prompts the mystical contemplation of God. Although most Philadelphians are not Quakers, there is a subtle intensity and reflectiveness that people born and raised here feel.

Certainly, there was a mystical experience of a kind last night at Citizens Bank Park. Some of those at the park almost certainly remember the infamous 1964 collapse of the Phillies; this 53 year old woman, a child of eight at the time, remembers reading the standings day by day, watching in horror as the number of games the Phillies led over the second-place Cincinnati Reds dwindle from 6 1/2 to none.

No child of the sixties who grew up in Philadelphia will ever forget that. It has meant that some of us always temper our enthusiasms with the knowledge that outcomes are unpredictable, that wishing for something will not always make it so.

The Phillies are the "oldest, continuous, one-name, one-city franchise in all of professional sports", as their website puts it. This means that some of the fans who have savored this championship are third or fourth or perhaps even fifth generation fans, like my six-year-old nephew Vaughn, who was at the game with his brother Garrett and his dad, my brother Keith; rooting for the Phillies is in his bones, his DNA.

Baseball is just a game, as I have observed before. Next week, something much more momentous will take place that will also involve partisans, passion, and rooting for one's own candidate.

But for today, one city in the US is feeling hopeful, and transformed by the common experience of a joy that unites us.

Let's hope it spreads.