I’ve got the plumbers coming tomorrow and $8K waiting to drop on my 0% financing-for-the-next-21-months credit card that mercifully came in the mail today. Tracey’s staying with her twin sister in anticipation of us being without water for the next two days. So what’s a bachelor to do? Why, watch Fever Pitch on the MLB Network, of course. I’d never seen the Farrelly Bros. flick starring Jimmy Kimmell and the incurably adorable Drew Barrymore before, but there wasn’t anything else on so I tuned it in.

The movie itself was nice, a formula kind of a love story framed by the incredible 2004 Red Sox championship season, but it was the last fifteen minutes of the movie, recalling that incredible and improbable comeback from oblivion by the Sox against the Yankees in the 2004 A.L. Championship Series that actually brought tears to my eyes.

My, how the memories flooded back! Starting with that Dave Roberts steal (watch him at 1:15 saying, “I got this” – pretty cool). I mean, you look back at it now. Down three games to none. Down by a run going into the ninth inning against Mariano Rivera. I mean, they were done. D-O-N-E done. And then the steal, and those incredible extra innings games in games four and five. Alex Rodriguez being a pussy in Game Six.

I’ll admit, this grown man teared up. Big time. The memories of Jerry Trupiano’s “Way Back! Waaaaaaaaaay Back!” home run calls. Curt Schilling and the bloody sock. Tessie. David Ortiz. the point where the World Series – the World Series! – with the Cardinals was purely anticlimactic. It was as if the very fact they had clawed their way back in a way no other team had ever done before that there was no way the baseball gods weren’t going to reward the Sox for their effort. The whole world was turned upside down.

Two additional World Series championships later you almost forget just how close the Sox came in 2004 to losing it all. That Dave Roberts safe call was close close CLOSE. Coulda gone either way. I remember sitting in some restaurant bar watching the Sox obliterate the Yankees in Game Seven and not really being able to believe it. Everything around seemed fuzzy and strange. And then, following the four-game sweep of the Cards, calling my folks and my brother Dave and my Auntie Marge and Uncle Don, tears in my eyes, champagne flowing, just wanting to make that New England connection that would and could only happen once in a lifetime.

Looking back eleven years later, I still can’t believe it. I have the entire 2004 Red Sox post-season games on DVD and you watch them and you still can’t believe they not only came back, but all the way back.

It’s a saga and an incredible suite of memories I will take with me to my grave.