Constable: Forget the past; present Cubs focus on future
All through the regular season, the Chicago Cubs kept matching accomplishments set by the greatest Cubs teams of the past.
Players and the team kept doing something that hadn't been done since 1908, 1945, 1935, 1924 or 1906.
Now these present Cubs are setting milestones for Cubs teams of the future.
The exhilarating rally Tuesday night in San Francisco that turned a three-run deficit into a one-run victory marked the biggest game-winning ninth-inning comeback in postseason series-clinching history for all of Major League Baseball, not just Cubs' history. The 6-5 victory ended all the talk about the Giants winning 10 straight elimination games, and propelled the Cubs into the National League Championship Series for the second year in a row.
The victory also exorcised another demon hanging out with the ghosts of Cubs' failures past. The 2016 Cubs now have done something no other Cubs team could accomplish - winning a postseason baseball game west of St. Louis.
In 1984, the Cubs were one win away from the World Series and lost three straight games in San Diego. The next time the Cubs had a shot in 1989, the Cubs and the San Francisco Giants started 1-1 at Wrigley, and then the Cubs went west and lost three straight games in Candlestick Park. In 2007, the Cubs lost two games in Arizona before being swept out of the National League Division Series at Wrigley.
The following year, the Cubs had the best record in baseball and dropped the first two games at Wrigley before surrendering the NLDS to the Dodgers in Los Angeles. This year, the Cubs dropped that heartbreaking 13-inning affair in San Francisco, which started Monday night and ended Tuesday morning.
That made the Cubs 0-10 in postseason games west of St. Louis.
It also sent some panicky Cubs fans to the memory bank, where they withdrew nightmares of goats, black cats, curses and heartaches of 1969, 1984, 2003 and even last year.
Flush with stories of past failures, those fans unleashed their fears in tweets along the lines of #not2003 and #5outsaway.
Meanwhile, in the present quest for future glory, Cubs' rookie Willson Contreras, who was an 11-year-old Venezuelan kid when the Cubs collapsed after that foul ball in the 2003 postseason, calmly hit a two-run single to tie the game. That set the stage for his younger teammate, Javier Baez, to come through with another clutch hit to win the clinching game and allow the Cubs an impromptu practice for the next couple of champagne celebrations.
It's understandable how some longtime Cubs fans let their memories keep them from relishing every joyous moment of this 2016 season. If your only experience with cars was breaking down on the side of the road with a 1984 Pontiac Phoenix and blowing a head gasket in your 2003 Chevy Astro van, you might be looking for reasons the 2016 Cubs caravan won't get you to the finish line.
But you don't have to do that with this team, which seems incapable of giving up hope. The regular season was a romp. The division series was great baseball and lots of fun. Enjoy this ride. Appreciate Cubs Manager Joe Maddon. Embrace the target.
Don't ever permit the pressure to exceed the pleasure. There's no need to curb your enthusiasm with this team.
As the Cubs say, and have proved this season, "We don't quit."