Argh! Grumble-Grumble...

What bothers me most is not that the Yankees lost, nor that the Yankees lost in seven, nor that the Yankees lost despite being up 3-0 in the series. It's that I now have to deal with one to three months of Red Sox fans being utterly insufferable about beating the Yankees. That's the real reason Yankees' fans are obsessed with beating the Red Sox: not because it's valued so highly in-and-of itself (it's going to take another twenty or so World Championships for New Yorkers to really feel that Boston is a "rival") but because we know that Boston fans feel the rivalry so intensely, so single-mindedly, so obsessively, that if their team should ever actually beat New York we'd never hear the end of it. Anyone who's ever lost a bet to a New Englander knows how petty and annoying they can be. We've been mentally multiplying that a thousand-fold, and the results ain't pretty. And now our nightmare scenario has arrived.

Well, I for one am wearing the interlocking N-Y out tomorrow, and every day hereafter. They're still the premiere franchise in American professional sports. They're still the 26-time world champions of baseball. They're still the team my father and grandfather rooted for, the team I was raised on from a pup. And there's next to nothing Derek Lowe, or anybody else, can do about it.