Twenty years ago, Armageddon was looming for Chicago. It was a Friday night, the Grateful Dead was playing at Soldier Field, and the Bulls were poised to win the NBA championship at home against the Phoenix Suns.

But things turned out in the end. The rains came–and came some more–and the Bulls lost the game, but still won the championship out in Phoenix. The band played, and it turned out to be the last time I saw them play live.

There hasn’t been anyone else who can play guitar like Jerry Garcia. I’m glad–dare I say grateful?–to have seen him play. And I’m glad that they were OK with the fans taping their shows, too. I think I’ll head over to Archive.org today and take a listen. Looks like a lousy day outside, but the music will help brighten it up, as it always does.

Lou Brock is probably the most special ballplayer of all for me. I remember seeing him steal second base in the very first baseball game I ever attended, in the summer of 1975. The Cardinals fans in attendance began yelling “Louuuuuuuuuu” and I thought he was being booed. My dad then explained that they were saying his name, as a sign of respect and appreciation. This made sense, and I felt a lot better about it then.

In 1977, two years later, Brock made history by passing Ty Cobb as the all-time leader in stolen bases. He held this record until Rickey Henderson passed his record in 1991. For those 14 years, Brock could legitimately say he was the best base stealer there ever was.

But records are made to be broken, aren’t they? It must have been a bittersweet moment for Brock when Henderson nudged him aside. And today, on a much smaller scale, I know how that feels. Back in February of this year, I wrote a piece for ChicagoSideSports that pointed out how Pete Rose, the all-time hits leader in baseball–has been left off of Topps baseball cards this year. The story went viral, as the saying goes, and within 48 hours I had seen my story, and sometimes even my name, in places I never thought possible. It was amazing, but like all things it had to end.

The story generated a lot of attention, as measured by retweets and Likes on Facebook. The number of Facebook Likes reached 1.3K (as they display the number), which was far and away more than any piece that had run on ChicagoSideSports. And I liked the feeling that nobody ranked above me in that regard.

And now, four months later, that mark is about to fall. A piece called “Rivalrybait” appeared at the beginning of the Stanley Cup finals between the Boston Bruins and Chicago Blackhawks, and it, too, went viral. It’s now at 1.3K on the Facebook likes, and as the series progresses, I’m sure that number will rise. After all, we’re only two games in, and it seems like the series will go seven games. I hope it does, so long as the Blackhawks are victorious in the end.

So like Lou Brock, I’m about to see my record fall. Good. It’s better to have something like this happen than not have it in the first place. And besides, there will be other stories to write in the weeks and months ahead. None are likely to create so much interest, but I’m willing to give it a try.

As I was out running errands yesterday, I heard Boston’s “Foreplay/Long Time” on the radio. It’s always been a song I can listen to, and yesterday was no exception. Upon hearing the late Brad Delp’s vocals, I was reminded of how, at the end of my high school days, I quoted the line “It’s been such a long time/I think I should be going” as a farewell note to my high school.

In truth, four years isn’t really such a long time. When you’re 17, though, it seems like forever. The 17 year-old who quoted that line was ready to move on to something else in his life. And now, more than a quarter-century later, I’m at that place. I’ve chased the dream that I had when I was a teenager, and I wound up here. And that suits me just fine.

From an early age, I knew that I had to leave my hometown in order to have the kind of life that I wanted. Where I would go to was an open question, but standing still was never an option. I suppose that’s called wanderlust, and I had it bad when I was in high school. But the irony is that whatever I had back then now seems to have gone away, entirely. I like where I am now, and have no desire to leave anytime soon.

The large part of that is wanting to have a sense of stability for my two daughters. As they get older, they will probably come to feel–as I once did–that the only thing that matters is going anywhere else. But the forces arrayed against them now are so much more powerful than what I was up against. College costs are soaring, and opportunities for people with a degree–but not much else–seem to be drastically reduced. The numbers that I’ve heard for college graduates moving back in with their parents (85 percent is the number I’ve seen) are just stunning. I literally would have gone berserk if I had to do that when I graduated from college, so many years ago.

It seems silly to be giving this matter too much thought now, when my oldest daughter (shown in the picture above) is graduating from 8th grade, and not high school or college. But my hope for her–and for her younger sister–is that when they get the wanderlust themselves, they will be able to beat the odds and successfully chase their own dreams, whatever those might be.

Game two of the NHL finals is going on as I type this out. I’m following the finals with great interest, because Chicago teams don’t win all that often. In the 23 years I’ve lived in Chicago, there was the Jordan era (six NBA titles), one Blackhawks Stanley Cup (and hopefully another one on the way soon) and some baseball title in 2005 that I try to block out as much as I can. And that’s all. So Chicago championship winners are few and far between.

But I don’t really follow hockey as a sport. My game is, was, and always will be baseball. And I know exactly why, too. I’ve written about it before, but it comes down to something that I picked up from my father back in the mid 1970s, when I was old enough to appreciate the game, and before my contrarian impulses toward my father had developed. There was a short window for baseball to enter my consciousness, and I’m happy that it did.

Whenever I see or talk to my father nowadays, we talk baseball. It feels like it’s the one thing that we have in common. In some ways, I think that’s why Field of Dreams resonates so well. Like Ray Kinsella’s character in that movie, I disagree with my father on just about anything. But baseball is the exception to this rule. At the end of the movie, Ray and the spectral version of his father utilize baseball as the way to bridge their differences. I get that, and I have a feeling that I’m not the only one who does.

So with Father’s day upon us, I’m compelled to point out the reason why baseball means so much to me. Baseball is what my father passed on to me, and I’ll forever hold onto it for exactly that reason. While I’m following hockey at the moment, it won’t ever capture my heart the way that baseball has.

Happy Father’s Day to my Dad, and every other father who reads this.

Another birthday has come and gone, and I’m finally at the age where every birthday seems like a blessing. I’m not religious (thanks to 13 years of Catholic school), but something or someone has been looking out for me to allow me to live this long. I haven’t done very much to help it along, either. Between bad dieting, little to no exercising, and a taste for booze that went on for way to long, I’m fortunate to be here in the first place.

So why is this post titled “Doing something right”? It seems that as a new year starts for me, I can realize that years from here on need to be earned. The booze is out of my life–fortunately–but the cheeseburger and fries and all of their poisonous ilk still remain. And physical exertion was no problem when I was 12, but at my new age it had better come back to me, and soon. And that’s my birthday present to myself.

Something Roger Ebert wrote a few years ago has stuck with me. He said that it’s better to learn something late in life than to never learn it at all. So I’ll act on this in the year to come, and we’ll see where it leads. It doesn’t mean that I won’t get run over by a bus one day, but it does mean I’ll be smarter than I have been to this point.

The Blackhawks’ win in Game one of the Stanley Cup finals has pointed out the futility of rooting for a losing team like the Cubs. I wrote this piece for ThroughTheFenceBaseball, explaining that watching a mediocre team during the regular season pales in comparison to a watching a championship-caliber team during the playoffs. And anyone who thinks otherwise is not being truthful about it.

There will be time for baseball later, I suppose, but for now I’m firmly on the Blackhawks bandwagon instead. It’s far more compelling, I’ll say that.

In the midst of trying to kill my blog a few days ago, I neglected to point out the two year anniversary of this blog on June 11. And I’m going to tie that in with my own birthday, which is coming up in just a couple of hours. Think of this as a 2-for-1 post.

How many more years have I got in me? We’ll find out in due time but for now, I’m enjoying life and looking forward to whatever comes my way. May each coming year find me this cheerful.

Tonight’s hockey game went into three overtime periods, and the sudden death nature of the playoffs meant that any scoring opportunity could have ended the game. And in the end, a shot taken at midnight deflected off of not one, but two Blackhawk players, and set off a wild celebration scene at the United Center.

I’m calling the winning shot the Midnight Rambler, to honor a Stones tune of the same name. And now I’m off to get some sleep. Tonight was a classic game, with an epic result. Can’t ask for too much more than that.

Like Chicago, Boston has a team in each of the four major sports leagues (MLB, the NFL, the NBA, and the NHL). Some other cities can also make that claim (including New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Dallas, Detroit, Denver, and Phoenix), but many more can’t (such as Los Angeles, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Kansas City, Seattle, Milwaukee, and San Antonio). Boston’s sports teams, like Chicago’s, are woven into the fabric of their community. Boston and Chicago are among the very best sporting towns in America.

So what’s the best way to determine which one is better? Counting championships is one way to do it, of course, but Chicago comes out on the wrong end of that equation. Besides, Andre Dawson played in both cities during his career, and never suited up for a World Series game—let alone won a championship—in either one, and yet he’s still in the Hall of Fame. Surely championships aren’t the only metrics that count.

Perhaps we can look at the times when a championship was decided between these two cities and their teams. The times when Boston and Chicago went mano a mano, with a championship on the line. That seems to be a fair way of stacking these cities up against each other. But, in looking at all the years these cities have been fielding professional teams, the sample size for making such a comparison is distressingly small.

Boston and Chicago are two of the Original Six hockey franchises, and the two teams have appeared in the Stanley Cup finals a combined 29 times over the years (with 18 appearances for the Bruins, and 11 appearances for the Blackhawks).  It’s astonishing that these two teams have never before played each other for the Stanley Cup. Over a five-year stretch in the early 1970s, the two teams traded off appearances in the finals, like ships passing in the night. But they never met each other in the finals, and so we have no history to serve as our guide.

How about basketball? The Bulls and the Celtics both play in the NBA’s Eastern Conference, meaning they couldn’t play against each other in the NBA Finals. The best they could hope for is to play in the Conference finals, but that hasn’t happened since the Bulls moved over from the Western Conference in 1980. From the Bulls’ founding in the late 1960s, and all through the 1970s, a Bulls-Celtics NBA final was a possibility, at least in theory, but it never came to pass. Again, basketball offers us no insight into past competition between the two cities.

The only time that Chicago and Boston have met to determine a baseball championship was all the way back in 1918. To give some idea of the time frame involved, consider that the first commercial radio station was still two years away. It was an important and unique Series in 1918, and one we still commemorate today, in a fairly significant way.

1918 was the first, and most likely the only, September Series that baseball has ever seen. As America was gearing up to become involved in the Great War in Europe (what we now call World War I), Secretary of War Newton D. Baker determined that all men had to “work or fight” by July 1. Baseball owners were permitted to end their season on Labor Day, with the World Series to be played the following week.

The Boston Red Sox won the American League pennant, led by their pitching star-turned-hitter Babe Ruth. The Cubs won the National League title, and returned to the series for the first time since 1910. It must have been awfully hard for Cubs fans to endure an eight-year gap between World Series appearances.

The Series opened in Comiskey Park—since the Cubs could draw larger crowds there than in their own Weeghman Park—on Thursday, September 5, 1918. A brass band played patriotic tunes throughout the game, but the seventh-inning stretch provided the most enduring moment. Francis Scott Key’s “Star-Spangled Banner” could be heard by the crowd of just under 20,000, and the fans came to their feet and sang along. Players on the field also stood at attention while this display of patriotism unfolded. Boston went on to win the first game by a 1-0 score, but the impact of Key’s song had not gone unnoticed.

The playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the seventh-inning stretch was repeated for Games two and three—think of it as an early version of “Sweet Caroline”–and the teams split those games. The Series then moved east to Boston, with the Red Sox holding a two games-to-one advantage. But before the Series started up again in Boston for Game four, Red Sox owner Harry Frazee had an idea.

Harry Frazee had purchased the Red Sox at the age of 36. He was a producer of musical shows, and is said to have eventually traded Babe Ruth away to help finance his productions. But all of that was still off in the future back in 1918. Frazee’s success means that he knew how to please an audience, and he decided to move the Francis Scott Key ritual from the seventh-inning stretch to before the game started. This was done for Games four, five, and six, and thus an American tradition was born.

The Red Sox won the Series in six games that year, with Carl Mays and Babe Ruth each winning two games for the Red Sox and posting ERAs of 1.00 and 1.06, respectively. With its victory over Chicago, Boston established inter-city bragging rights that would last—incredibly—for another 67 years. That’s because the two cities would not meet again, with a championship on the line, until Super Bowl XX in the New Orleans Superdome on January 26, 1986. That’s when Chicago emphatically evened the score against Boston.

Any Chicagoan over the age of 30 could probably tell you about that game. It started out with a scare, when Walter Payton fumbled the ball on the second play from scrimmage. New England kicked a field goal just over a minute into the game, and it looked like the AFC’s wild card team had a chance against the mighty Bears. But by halftime, the Bears had built a commanding 23-3 lead, and the rout was on. The lead ballooned to 44-3 by the end of the third quarter, and the final score was 46-10. To give an example of the Bears’ domination, consider that New England’s leading rusher was Tony Collins, who gained four yards on three carries. A more dominating Super Bowl performance has not been seen since.

After several decades of waiting, Chicago had finally evened up with Boston at one title apiece. And since then, there has been nothing new to report. Over the past quarter of a century, Boston and Chicago have not had an opportunity to break their championship deadlock on the field. Fans in each city probably thought 2003 would be the year that the Red Sox and the Cubs would meet again in the World Series. It turned out that Dusty Baker, Grady Little, Mark Prior, and Pedro Martinez had other ideas. And another opportunity had not presented itself, until now.

Chicago fans think our teams are the best, and Boston fans think likewise about their teams. After the dust of this year’s Stanley Cup finals has settled, we’ll know which city can claim bragging rights over the other. Because those rights are likely to last for a very long time, I’m going with the Blackhawks in six games. Go Blackhawks! And Go Chicago!

The Cubs played a game in the fog last night, and I was inspired to write this. I hope everyone is familiar with the scene I was writing about, but if not, enjoy it anyway.