'Bring us a World Series'

ST. LOUIS -- In Portland, Ore., a little more than 85 years ago, not even a year after the Boston Red Sox beat the Chicago Cubs to win the World Series, a boy was born.

John Michael Paveskovich grew up, fell in love with the game of baseball and, years later, played professionally for the Sox. He was a good little infielder, too, an All-Star in 1946. He hung around the game, managing the Sox briefly in the early '60s. He's been part of them, it seems, all along.

Just a few months after Johnny was born, the Sox sold the great Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees, a move that, as everyone knows, altered the baseball universe, tossing the Sox into a wallow of bad luck and ineptitude and -- if you believe in those sorts of things -- curses that would last nearly a lifetime. The skid actually started before the Babe was sold, way before Johnny got there. It carried on for the seven-plus years he played for the Sox. And through his managerial tenure. And, of course, it persisted afterward. For years and years. For generations.

And then Wednesday came. On a cool October evening in the nation's heartland, the Sox threw off nearly nine decades of frustrations by beating the St. Louis Cardinals in Game 4 of the World Series, completing an unlikely sweep and claiming their first Series title since 1918.

Johnny Pesky, 85 years young, was there. Front and center. Smiling.

He knew all along he would be.

"I dreamt about this day," he said in the joyous Red Sox clubhouse after the game. "I said my prayers every night to the big guy: 'Bring us a World Series.'"

In Game 4 of the 100th World Series, Pesky's prayers and the prayers of generations of Red Sox fans were finally answered. It was a celestial, almost otherworldly occasion. It was even marked, late in the game, by a lunar eclipse.

The heavenly display was a mere sideshow compared to the earthbound one, at least in the eyes of the Red Sox Nation. The Sox, after making history by dispatching the hated Yankees in a come-from-behind win in the American League Championship Series, beat the Cardinals 3-0, four-hitting the most powerful lineup in the National League. It was a fitting finish to a short, markedly one-sided and otherwise completely forgettable Series.

This was not the type of Series the Sox were expected to play. This was a Series without sweat, for the most part, and without tears, at least until afterward. There was tension in every game, but that was more the result of the weight of waiting 86 years rather than pressure from the Cardinals