Cubs in the playoffs! Fans believe it won't mean more heartbreak
By Burt Constable
bconstable@dailyherald.com
Saturday's champagne celebration at Wrigley Field may have seemed a little flat after the Cubs suffered a third straight loss at home. But fans, giddy about the team's first playoff appearance since 2008, don't care if their Cubs backed into the postseason thanks to a loss by the San Francisco Giants.
"It doesn't matter how we do it, just that we do it," said Round Lake's Michelle Filip, 21, while watching the Cubs lose with friend Janie Mae Reinhart, 21, of Round Lake.
Of course, giddy Cubs fans remember how the team won back-to-back division championships in 2007 and 2008 and didn't win a playoff game either year. Or how the Cubs took us on an ethereal playoff journey in 2003 that came to a devastating detour just five outs from the World Series. Before that, the Cubs lost 10 straight postseason series.
Does Friday's ecstasy merely raise the bar for how far our hearts can fall into agony come October?
"Oh, no. This is their year," says Jennifer Barrett, 50, a longtime Cubs fan from Ingleside. "Of course, every year is their year, but this year feels like it's real."
Her father and fellow Cubs fan, George Barrett of Fox Lake, who died in February, had his fill of Cubs postseason disappointment. He was in Wrigley Field for that infamous 2003 playoff game, when a foul ball down the left field line began the plunge to a crushing defeat.
"Don't bring me back. I can't take it anymore," Barrett remembers her father saying. Losses can be devastating.
Only 22, Kevin Tednes of Hoffman Estates began his heartbreak honing with the 2003 disaster. "I remember just watching them lose. Killed me," Tednes says. He shares this year's Cubs playoff pilgrimage with girlfriend Emily Allan, also 22 and from Hoffman Estates.
"I can't even imagine how the city would be if they won (the World Series)," Allan allows herself to dream. "It probably would just shut down."
But first, there is a one-game playoff, probably against those pesky Pirates, who haven't won a World Series since 1979, which is a long time, unless you put it up against the Cubs last World Series championship in 1908.
"It's hard to see the whole season come down to one game," Allan says.
"It drives me nuts that we're the third-best team in the Major Leagues and we have to put up with it," longtime fan Debra Hruby of Wheaton says of the probable one-game playoff. She and others acknowledge that this team, just like every Cubs team in our lifetimes, could be bumped from the playoffs before reaching the pinnacle.
"But this year is a little different," says Mike Diamond, a Cubs fan from Buffalo Grove. "I don't think I'll be heartbroken if they lose."
Almost nobody expected the Cubs, who often include five rookies in their starting lineup, to be contenders this season.
"If they don't do it this year, they are a young team," says Donna Stone, 47, of Fox Lake.
"So this is just the icing on the cake for years to come," says Zach Hicks, 20, a fan who lives in Elgin and attends Judson College.
"Yes, I will be disappointed if we don't win the World Series. But will I be disappointed in this season? No way! It just seems different, and it gets better every day. There's been so much fun at the ballpark this year," says Hruby, who not only is a fan but has been working this year as a tour guide for Wrigley Field.
Last Sunday, she was waiting with other guides at about 8:30 a.m. outside Wrigley Field when ace pitcher Jake Arrieta jogged up to the locked gate.
"It's still locked? Oh, well, how's it going?" asked Arrieta, who figured he would just wait with the tour guides. During their chat, Hruby caught the eye of a security guard.
"Hey, could somebody let Jake Arrieta in?" she asked.
The guard didn't have the right key, so Arrieta politely said he'd run around the neighborhood and come back later. That sort of laid-back, unselfish attitude makes this team fun to support.
"They've built a team now," says Hruby. "I'll be sad if they don't go any further, but I can't be unhappy about this season. I won't be crushed. If we don't do it this year, we'll probably do it next year."
"Definitely in two or three years," agrees Hicks.
"This year, there's a different vibe, a different feeling," says Diamond, whose 4-year-old son, Noah, sports a homemade necklace reading "I My Cubs" and who predicts Cubs outfielder Dexter Fowler will homer. But Diamond remains hopeful the Cubs still will be playing in a month, when local fans generally have moved on to the Chicago Bears.
"The way the Cubs are playing, anything's possible," Diamond says. "And that's a good thing, because the Bears are in trouble."