As often happens when the Yankees make a long post-season run filled with exciting games that keep me wound up for hours after they end - especially when every game in the postseason seems like a classic, regardless of who played - I've come down with a lousy cold which - coupled with the same pressures that have killed blogging this month - have prevented me from venting about this year's frustrating loss to the Marlins. (I still have trouble comprehending that the Marlins are World Champions, and not just due to illness.)

Though I've promised many undelivered things, I am working on a lo-o-ong post about the State of the Yankees that will be worth the wait. I promise.

For now, I'll just say that this loss feels - to this Yankee fan - much worse than the one in 2001. The parallels to 1964 or 1981 are pretty scary.

And some of us who were eight years old in 1981, for whom Bob Lemon's pinch-hitting for Tommy John in Game 6 is the first managerial move we remember second-guessing, are very annoyed at the constant assertions by non-Yankee fans that we fans feel "entitled" to win or that we "don't appreciate" anything short of ultimate triumph. Like most Yankee-bashing, those sentiments are based on ignorance and jealousy. The truth is exactly the opposite. We remember how easy expectations of continued success can be transformed into despair, Hemingway-style - "gradually and then suddenly." We remember the decade whose high moments were the 1980s "treadmill" (see the 1988 Baseball Abstract), whose frantic attempts to get back to the championship level led to the low moments, a paranoia-fueled frenzy of Chuck Carys and Mel Halls. We see how hard it can be to get back to the championship level once the team has slipped off it - our friends in Boston are glad to remind us if we ever forget. And when the team returned to excellence in 1993, we promised ourselves that we would appreciate every triumph and achievement. It is the prospect of losing those moments - and who knows for how long? - that drives the Yankee fans crazy.

A little bit.

Seriously, congratulations to the Marlins (if only they had a different owner - more below on that); they were an awesome story and played very well. And even the poor, misbegotten Yankees had a great season to get to Game 6 of the World Series, for goodness' sakes.

It is just hard for a Yankee fan to not feel like an opportunity was missed, and who knows when the next one will come?

P.S. Bud Selig handing the trophy to Jeffrey Loria must have represented the greatest concentration of baseball malevolence since Charles Comiskey dined alone.
But I'm not bitter or anything.

UPDATE: In the New Republic, Spencer Ackerman has similar thoughts regarding an editorial by the NYT which endorsed a Cubs-Red Sox World Series:

[L]et me disabuse Yankee haters like Hartford resident Chad MacDonald, who was quoted in the Times as saying that Yankee fans simply "expect to win." That's not true. Yankee fans like myself had our fandom shaped by the miserable drought years of 1980 to 1995, when not even first-rate talents like Don Mattingly, Willie Randolph, Dave Winfield, and Dave Righetti could rescue the team from bitter loss after bitter loss. On the bus to my Canarsie elementary school in 1986, I remember watching formerly stalwart Yankee fans doing the Tim Teuffel Shuffle in the hope that the Mets would win the World Series. Even during the Yankee renaissance that began in 1996, the victories have always felt precarious (well, maybe not in 1998). It might surprise the Times to learn that today's Yankee fans have a sense of tragedy to go with the triumphalism. Maybe the Times will pay some attention next season.