A deserved ‘thank you’ for the Sox

While I won’t be among the millions in Boston this weekend to celebrate the newly crowned champs of baseball, I’ll be sure to raise a glass in honor of the Red Sox and in gratitude to a bunch of idiots who took their fans on one of the greatest rides we could ever have hoped for.

Much appreciation, guys, for providing that blessed seven-month-long diversion that began last March, lifting us all from another long dark winter and launching us directly into spring, no matter what the calendar said. Just watching those spring-training games on TV allowed us fans here in Maine to bask a bit in the faraway Florida sunshine and warmth, even when we knew we still had plenty of snow left to shovel and icy roads to navigate.

Thanks also for making all of New England seem at times like one big town with a shared regional identity that’s not so easy to find in this country anymore, a single community bonded in a kind of hopeful despair that was oddly special and unique over the last 86 tortured years.

Thanks for always being a familiar presence in the background of our lives, from opening day on, and for giving us plenty to gripe, cheer and agonize about at home and at work each day.

Thanks for your screwball hairdos, your clownish antics in the dugout, your gunk-smeared helmets and colorful personalities that made the dreaded Yankees look like a collection of pin-striped grim reapers by comparison.

Thank you for dispelling, during all those dramatic battles with the Yankees throughout the season, that ludicrous notion voiced by an unenlightened portion of the sports world that the beautiful game of baseball is somehow too long, too slow and too boring to maintain its century-old reputation as America’s pastime.

I guess I have to thank the Yanks for that, too, because without them in the mix there would be no Shakespearean subplots about good versus evil or bizarre curses lifted straight out of the Middle Ages or any of the other weird themes that make being a Red Sox fan an extraordinarily complicated and spiritually exhausting undertaking.

And thanks for letting me, a relative newcomer to the long-suffering ranks, feel as much a part of Red Sox Nation in these last few years as those who were born into it and knew intimately the agony of defeat and the quiet desperation that defined every baseball season of their lives.

Thanks for the exquisite nail-biters that kept all of us up way too late at night, and for enticing our kids to sneak in the last couple of dramatic innings on their radio headsets when they were supposed to be asleep.

Thanks so much for connecting generations of the New England faithful this season in one delirious and historic run; for making diehard fans wish their parents and grandparents could have lived long enough to have experienced it; and for causing grownups to cry with joy for a change and to feel like kids all over again.

So we toast you, gentlemen, for finally making the dream come true for millions, for silencing all the silly talk about that curse that never existed in the first place, and for restoring a sense of balance and harmony to a Red Sox universe whose planets have been wobbling out of alignment since 1918.

Enjoy your remarkable accomplishment, you loveable idiots, while your grateful fans spend the long, dark winter trying to figure out the alien concept of contentment and who the heck we’re supposed to be now that we can’t be the angst-ridden underdogs anymore.

For Red Sox fans, winning it all may be a tough act to follow.