Imrem: Believe it, Cubs won the World Series in our lifetimes
Wrong never felt so numbingly right.
I thought, said and wrote for decades that the Cubs wouldn't win a World Series in my lifetime.
Not even if I lived forever, which I intend to do.
Well, the Cubs achieved the impossible Wednesday night by winning the World Series with an 8-7 victory at Cleveland.
The game went 10 innings, but who was counting after the Cubs won their first championship since 1908?
Back in May, Sports Illustrated declared that an outcome like this would be the "last great American sports story."
The Commissioner's Trophy no longer belongs only to perennial powerhouses like the Red Sox and Cardinals, to last outposts like Miami and Arizona, to, of all places, Canada twice and even to the South Side of Chicago.
The Cubs can display the hardware in Wrigley Field and it'll look as comfortable as Springsteen in blue jeans.
My goodness, think about it, the Cubs won the World Series!
What's next for baseball, the Yankees filing for bankruptcy?
I remained skeptical until the final out of the final inning, but the Cubs did stunningly, remarkably, thrillingly win a World Series in my lifetime.
As a sports writer, I haven't been a fan of the Cubs or White Sox or any other baseball team for a long time but like most people I could identify history as I saw it unfolding.
The wait for the Cubs has lasted so many decades that for all anyone can remember, the crowd in the stands last time consisted of 20 percent men, 20 percent women and 60 percent dinosaurs.
Let me explain why it was impossible for me to believe that this day would happen.
I was introduced to baseball between the ages of 5 and 10 - impressionable years for a kid - and those weren't exactly the Cubs' glory days.
Over those six seasons, the Cubs were a red carpet and the National League walked over them with muddy galoshes.
The average Cubs season looked like this: Sixth or seventh place in the eight-team NL, 19 games under .500 and 30 games out of first place.
Don't you think that initiation to Cubdom - also known as Cubdumb back then - could scar a young baseball fan for life? The half-joke was that countless men died as bachelors after vowing not to marry until the Cubs won a World Series.
The Cubs had a smattering of championship-caliber players over the years - like Bruce Sutter, Andre Dawson and Ryne Sandberg - but never a championship team.
The Cubs couldn't win a pennant even after Ernie Banks came along. They couldn't win a World Series even after he was joined by Billy Williams, Fergie Jenkins and Ron Santo.
Several close calls followed, but each was accompanied by a curse, jinx or hex (yes, the Cubs were cursed, jinxed and hexed).
On this night in Game 7 the Cubs exorcised the demons of all those failed "next years."
Finally, after 108 seasons, at 11:47 p.m. Chicago time on Nov. 2, 2016, the Cubs won a World Series.
In the process, they enabled this generation of Cubs fans to celebrate for previous generations of friends and relatives that didn't live to see it.
The moment was so momentous that I won't bother to ask what took so long.
It's enough that the Cubs actually won a World Series in my lifetime.
Being proved wrong really does feel right.
mimrem@dailyherald.com