We Have Sought Bliss, And We Have Found It

We know. We know it wasn't the most exciting World Series for everyone to watch. It was sloppy, it was short, it was interrupted by a rainout, it had no Pujols-off-Lidge or Roberts-stealing-second moments. If you were anything other than a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals, it was anything but a memorable World Series. In fact, you might take this World Series as a frustration, as an example of why baseball's postseason structure is inherently flawed, allowing an 83-win team — a record that is, we must say, slightly deceiving — to go on an October run that somehow dissolved the value of an entire 162-game season. You could think all these things, and maybe you'd be right, and maybe you'd be wrong. The beauty of baseball — and, really, the beauty of being a sports fan — is that it's entirely irrational and the more you try to explain it, the more logic falls apart. There is no logic. Sometimes, the impossible just happens, and explaining it is like trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube.

Which is why we think it's best, instead, just to pour tequila over your head and go crazy, folks.

in the 50-plus hours since Adam Wainwright struck out Brandon Inge to win the St. Louis Cardinals' 10th World Series on Friday night, we have put much conscious thought into not having much conscious thought. The first 16 hours were unrestrained celebration — or, as our dad put it, "screaming like a goddamned idiot" — trying to avoid sleep, trying to avoid anything that would involve a transfer from that world, the screaming idiot world, the madness of an ether binge world, and the rest of the world, the one that involves bills and careers and obligations and spring training. When you want a moment to last forever, when it's something you've waited for and obsessed about and never thought possible, you'll hang onto it far longer than is reasonably healthy.

We were lucky; not only did we get to be physically present for that moment — There! We were really there! — but because it happened on a Friday, we had a whole weekend just to revel in it. To roll around in it, to wrap ourselves up in it, to floss with it. We have been walking around all weekend with the blissful stare of the lobotomized. We come back today aware that life goes on, that a Cardinals World Championship doesn't actually change our lives, that there's still work to be done, lives to be lived. And that's fine. But it happened, we were there, and we think that labotomized bliss face still has some life yet. The Cardinals won the World Series. Everything else in life, well, jeez, that's just bonus, really.