Angry Peter

Author: Peter Yordan

None but the most dilatory of students can still remain who remembers the exquisite torture of a Red Sox postseason on Middlebury's campus. Thanks to baseball's best lineup and an embarrassing (if not improbable) meltdown by the Mariners, all of us will get a chance to see the Red Sox nation at their twisted best. Those few, those unhappy few, that band of brothers at Middlebury who have with pained faces watched their Sox fall short of October ever year since 1999 will soon be joined by multitudes of Boston bandwagon-jumpers. I did some quick research, and apparently 95% of the school does in fact live within 15 miles of 495. This means that everyone who normally would have given up on Pedro and Co. by now is hastily dusting off that Red Sox hat that normally sits forlornly on a peg on their wall.

Last spring I talked about how the Red Sox fans here seemed to perversely want their team to fail. Well, it seems I was wrong, for all the Red Sox fans I run into sure seem desperate for them to win. It hasn't stopped them, however, from whining nervously about the many heinous ways they could lose. Apparently the Sox have managed to get to the playoffs with someone like Scott Saurbeck pitching for them in close games. These are the types of things that make a Boston fan twitch involuntarily when he or she tries to fall asleep at night.

So I think it is fair to say that a certain dementia could well set in throughout the College during the next week or two or three. Everyone at Middlebury will be affected, because everyone here either is a Red Sox fan or knows one. You will recognize them by their blank glassy stares in class the day after a loss or their bleary eyes and stupid grins the morning after an extra inning win. Either way, they will be reduced to a sort of primal grunting in order to communicate - UGG GRRA CHAD FOX, GHURG RWAA.

You may well have professors who too are members of the Nation - curtly dismissing any discussion points by students in Yankee hats and vainly striving to keep their trains of thought from being derailed by Trot Nixon.

Perhaps some hapless Middkid might wander into some dorm lounge, and, when faced by a fidgety mass students sitting in front of lounge TVs, unfinished homework vainly splayed across their laps, ask if they would mind switching to West Wing, only to find himself waking up in the Health Center. In any event stay tuned and keep hope alive - perhaps the dreaded curse - of gloomy Sox fans- will finally be lifted.