and told him to hold me a pair for a potential Game 7 at Yankee Stadium and we agreed to a price.
The Yankees were already up 2-0 in the series when we left for BWI. She sat in our hotel room all night and watched the Yankees score 11 unanswered runs in the middle innings of Game 3 and refused to turn the TV off until the final out as they lost 19-8 that night.
The next night, she was resigned to watching the last outs of the 2004 season, as her Red Sox were about to get swept right in Fenway Park in the bottom of the ninth inning.
Obviously, the Dave Roberts miracle comeback began and 72 hours later, we were in the upper deck of Yankee Stadium for Game Seven. Yankee stadium pic
Johnny Damon hit that leadoff home run, and I honestly don’t ever think I’ve ever seen a bigger smile on her face, not even when they won the World Series seven days later.
Later in the game, when it was decided (but the highlight for me was still hearing the Yankees fans chant “Who’s your Daddy?” to Pedro Martinez one last time!) we headed down behind home plate to find my childhood friend Shonda Schilling, whose hubby had pitched the famous bloody sock game the night before.
We somehow forgot our camera that night in a rush to get on the highway toward The Bronx. Shonda had hers. She handed me the camera and told me to take pics of her celebrating. Then, she took pictures of us.
The picture that Shonda snapped of us — BOTH of us in her Red Sox caps (hey it was kinda cold, right?) — is a centerpiece of our photo display in our home.
You can see the final score behind us and the red jerseys dancing on the field at Yankee Stadium. I’ve always HATED the Red Sox, and it was STILL kinda cool to see: the BOSTON Red Sox dancing on the ghost of Babe Ruth at Yankee Stadium.
(Remember: I saw the Bucky Dent game in 1978 on TV and the Red Sox STILL hadn’t beaten the Yankess 26 years later!)
And the picture was taken by Curt Schilling’s wife. With Curt Schilling’s camera.
Do you think that my wife’s friends and relatives in New Hampshire think she’s making that story up?
(For the record: they do!)
For my wife, the World Series and the games at Fenway Park and in St. Louis were sorta anticlimactic. I offered to fly her to St. Louis and get tickets, but between all of our other travel plans and football season and the fact that she really does have a job (and one that she’d like to keep!) we decided against it.
As she said: “There’s NOTHING that’s gonna top beating the Yankees in Game 7. There’s no way winning the World Series and being there will be more fun than that!”
I had a tricked-up plan to get her to a potential Game 7 at Fenway Park, but it never got that far.
For the clincher of the sweep in Game 4, we watched on TV from our place and I worked up some of New England’s finest: Fenway franks, some Legal’s clam chowder and a six-pack of Sam Adams (not a sponsor, but it IS the Boston beer).
I had a bottle of Dom Perignon champagne that I had bought from Fritz at White Marsh Plaza Liquors about seven years earlier. I bought it for a “special occasion” and never drank it. Not on the night of our engagement (yes, that was on an Orioles-Red Sox game night as well in April 2004…we went to Nacho Mama’s for a Natty Boh, hold the bubbly). Not on the night of our wedding. Not on our first anniversary.
But for the Red Sox, I made a donation and a memory.
In the ninth inning we iced it.
When Pedro Martinez was dousing his teammates in the Busch
