The author of this wonderful blog is my dear sister and the best Red Sox fan I know. Tonight, she is heartbroken so I am contributing this post while she recovers from the 2011 shocking slide. I am posting the short version (altered to reflect today’s date) of a poem authored by the late A. Bartlett Giamatti. For 20 years, Joe Castiglione has recited the poem as he signs off after the final game of the season. I think it is especially fitting for this year’s finale…

Green Fields of the Mind

It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today, September 29, a day of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone.

Go here for the long version: http://mason.gmu.edu/~rmatz/giamatti.html