I was a ball of instincts 40 years ago tonight at that moment Marty Barrett swung through strike three from Jesse Orosco to end the seventh game of the 1986 World Series in favor of the New York Mets.
Instinctively, I had to confirm for myself that this was really happening. Judging by the jubilation at Shea Stadium very much on the television screen in front of me, it surely was.
Instinctively, I remembered it had happened once before, seventeen years earlier, therefore what I was experiencing wasn’t a wholly new sensation. Then, in 1969, I hadn’t had much runway to get me to the Mets winning the World Series, yet I knew immediately in the weeks I had become hooked on this team as a six-year-old that this was what I wanted and understood on contact how special this was.
Instinctively, I cherished that this, now, was the payoff for the seventeen years of waiting in between October 16, 1969, and October 27, 1986. You root hard for your team when it’s not winning a World Series, boy is it gonna be great when they do win a World Series, even if it takes until you’re 23. The World Series had just been won. It was absolutely great.
It stayed absolutely great through the night, into the next morning, into the next night, into the rest of the week, into the next month, and the month after that, and when the new year began, and the next Spring Training got underway. The season it led to wasn’t so great, but I never fully let go of remembering we had won the World Series the October before. Every October forward, I’ve thought of the World Series the Mets won in 1986, how they scaled the world championship heights every minute of that year, how they arrived at the peak of those heights, how it felt to realize it had really happened.
I wish there would have been another one since. I wish there will be another one soon. At age 63, I can say with certainty the length of the wait for another one has gone on too long. I could have said that at age 33, 43, and 53 as well. Yet the depth of the joy from when the wait between the first Mets world championship and the second Mets world championship ended overwhelms any regret that postdates what occurred 40 years ago tonight.
[1]Forty years ago tonight, Orosco struck out Barrett. Forty years ago tonight, the Mets won the World Series. It really happened. It never won’t have happened.