Becoming a Sox fan is painful

I’m finally starting to know the pain of the true Red Sox fan.

Since I’m fairly new to the whole torturous experience, having adopted the team as my own only in the last few years, I’m not yet certain of the depths of this most famous of seasonal disappointments.

You can read all you want about the perennial heartbreak of the Red Sox faithful. You can hear it discussed throughout an entire season of baseball on TV and radio. But you can’t know what it really means until you’ve lived it – or died with it.

I felt the first pang at approximately 2:30 a.m. Thursday, when fatigue and an early-morning appointment forced me to turn off the TV just before the end of the marathon first playoff game against Oakland. I knew a miracle was possible while I slept – the Red Sox have been pulling off miracles all season – but deep down inside I knew better.

When I woke up and heard that the Red Sox had lost the critical opener, I wasn’t surprised. I expected it, in fact. It seemed like the premature beginning of the end I’d heard so much about, the desperate slide into postseason oblivion that appears to have been written into the Fenway script 85 years ago.

Later that afternoon, following the second Red Sox loss, I found myself losing hope faster than I thought possible. I was developing the sense of resignation that lifelong Sox fans know so intimately, the late-season defeatism that is so much a part of the New England sports psyche.

I was becoming a true Red Sox fan.

It’s not that I didn’t have plenty of warning that this could happen to me one day. When I first decided to become a devoted follower of the team, a few long-suffering Maine fans tried hard to dissuade me. I think they really wanted to protect me from the pain, bless their wounded hearts.

“Are you sure you want to go through with this?” they would ask, regarding me with an almost paternalistic patience and compassion. “We were born this way. We are fated to be Red Sox fans, just as our parents were and their parents before them. This is our cross to bear, but it doesn’t have to be yours. Think 1918, and be careful.”

But did I listen? Of course not.

I jumped enthusiastically into Red Sox baseball and made it my seasonal addiction. What games I couldn’t watch on TV I made sure to follow on the radio. I commandeered the remote control during the late innings, trying unsuccessfully to make my loving family understand why “Trading Spaces” was mindless entertainment when Manny happened to be at the plate with two men on in the bottom of the ninth. I scoffed at the Curse of the Bambino, insisting that no team’s destiny can be sealed forever by a silly superstition. In time, my dislike for the Yankees deepened into a genuine, full-blown, Red Sox brand of pinstripe hatred.

Just before the playoffs began, I actually believed with all my heart that this was the year it would happen. The Red Sox would beat Oakland, shame the Yankees, and go on to take the World Series. But when I looked around for other fans who shared my unshakeable confidence, all I found was the restraint of fans conditioned by long experience to hope for the best but to expect the worst.

If I’m smart, I’ll adopt that guarded philosophy for Game 3 on Saturday night. Anything to help soften the crushing disappointment that looks to be heading this way again, right on schedule.

Yes, I really am becoming a true Red Sox fan after all.