The two buddies had learned, like all Cubs fans, to seize such moments in spite of-or because of-their imminent decay, to salt their remnants with mirth so they could be larded away for all the long winters to come.

'He used to bring the ball to my bar to show the girls.' 'Marty had it encased in a plastic box and bought 50 copies of that SI,' reported Chris. While lefthander Cole Hamels was throttling the Cubs, staking the Phillies to a 1-0 lead through the fourth, Chris was catching me up on his metamorphosis from bartender to executive producer of his own company, Region Sports Network, covering local sports in northwest Indiana, and of what had become of Marty's Sosa home run ball. Drew Warnick, the sombreroed one immediately to my right, was hoisting beers to his final hours of freedom before his weekend wedding, and to his certainty that this Cubs team was the one that would at last deliver his tribe from generations of murdered hope, pausing only to grab one spare plastic cowboy hat and deputize me into his bachelor party just as Chris and Marty were arriving. No man would drape around his neck three long chains of green beads, one of silver and one of gold, place atop his head a two-foot-tall sombrero with a kamikaze headband wrapped around its cone in honor of the new rightfielder from the Far East, attach a colossal pair of pink synthetic testicles and woefully undersized penis to his loins, and lead a throng of two dozen men wearing white plastic cowboy hats into Wrigley's rightfield bleachers in order to be the butt of a joke. Could God be that heartless? Could this all be another cruel joke? 721 clip at home, owned baseball's best record and sat six games ahead of the second-place Brewers. The Cubs were entering this series playing at a. the longest drought in the history of major North American professional sports. This summer was the 10th anniversary of Sammy's epic chase, the 20th anniversary of the first night game played at Wrigley, the 60th anniversary of WGN's coverage of the Cubs, the 100th anniversary of the seventh-inning stretch song- Take Me Out to the Ballgame-immortalized by the Cubs' legendary voice, Harry Caray, and, looming largest of all, the 100th year since the Cubs' last championship, in 1908. The old yard hummed with harmonic convergence. Tracing on the Internet the now-defunct phone number for Chris Ramirez that I'd scribbled down that night, I'd found his mother's number, she'd found Chris, he'd found Marty, I'd found our old seats, and here we were, toasting old times as the Cubs, attempting to win a 10th straight series and run away with the National League Central Division, opened a four-game Labor Day weekend series against the Phillies. And never would've, if magic weren't afoot in Wrigleyville again, and if cyberspace weren't so loose-lipped.

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