Spring Break
From the Sidelines: The year of destiny
Tim Ahrens
Issue date: 10/9/03 Section: Sports
It has to be destiny. The Chicago Cubs and the Boston Red Sox seem to be on course to meet in the World Series, and I can't think of any other word than destiny.
The long struggles suffered by the Cubs and Red Sox are well documented - the two teams combined to win seven of the first 15 World Series, but neither has won one since.
Despite those struggles and histories of dramatically choking when it counts the most, the Cubs and Red Sox seem ready to turn their fortunes around. It's destiny that one of these teams will win it all this year.
That's why it doesn't seem to be such a leap in logic for me to say that the Minnesota Vikings are a team of destiny this year.
It's true that the Vikings don't play baseball, but the Cubs and Red Sox are doing some things that seem to be defying everything we know about their franchises, so why not the Vikings?
Even though the Vikings are 5-0 entering their bye week, I will not predict that they will win the Super Bowl this year. I know this franchise too well, and the NFC title game from 1998 is too recent in my memory to ever predict the Vikings to win it all. But if the Cubs could meet the Red Sox in the World Series, why couldn't the Vikings pull off something similar?
If you ignore everything that happened to the Red Sox before the 60s, they have some similarities to the postseason failure of the Red Sox. The last four times the Red Sox got to the World Series, they lost in seven games.
Their losses have been fairly dramatic, too. From a ninth-inning base hit in Game 7, 1975, to a 10th-inning error in Game 6, 1986, the Red Sox have been tantalizingly close to the title, only to see it snatched away from them.
The Vikings never have been that close to the title - in their four Super Bowl losses, they've never so much as had the lead - but the Purple sure know about heartbreak.
In the 1998 season, there was that inexplicable championship game against the Atlanta Falcons, in which about 20 things had to happen, in sequence, for the Falcons to beat the 15-1 Vikings in the Dome. Naturally, all those things happened, in order. The details are too messy to explore any further.
I also refuse to talk about the 2000 title game. Seriously - that never happened. There was also a near miss in 1987, but 1987 was a good sports year, so we won't focus on the negative.
In 1975, though, the biggest shocker came, one that truly defines the near-miss history of the Vikings.
Have you ever heard of a Hail Mary pass in football? If you have, you probably didn't know that you have the Vikings to thank for putting that term into the football vocabulary forever.
Again, the details are too messy to get into, but they involve the Dallas Cowboys, a whiskey bottle and man named Drew Pearson, whose name I'm not allowed to mention in the presence of my father.
The Red Sox have their own version of Pearson. He is Bucky Dent, who hit the home run for the New York Yankees in the 1978 playoff at Fenway Park. To this day, most Red Sox fans firmly believe that Dent's middle name is ... something my editors won't let me print. We don't know yet if the Red Sox and Cubs will meet in the World Series, and even if they do, it won't mean that the Vikings are destined for greatness.
But it would be nice to dream, wouldn't it?
Ahrens is a senior print journalism major and a chief copy editor of The Spectator. "From the Sidelines" appears every Thursday.
The long struggles suffered by the Cubs and Red Sox are well documented - the two teams combined to win seven of the first 15 World Series, but neither has won one since.
Despite those struggles and histories of dramatically choking when it counts the most, the Cubs and Red Sox seem ready to turn their fortunes around. It's destiny that one of these teams will win it all this year.
That's why it doesn't seem to be such a leap in logic for me to say that the Minnesota Vikings are a team of destiny this year.
It's true that the Vikings don't play baseball, but the Cubs and Red Sox are doing some things that seem to be defying everything we know about their franchises, so why not the Vikings?
Even though the Vikings are 5-0 entering their bye week, I will not predict that they will win the Super Bowl this year. I know this franchise too well, and the NFC title game from 1998 is too recent in my memory to ever predict the Vikings to win it all. But if the Cubs could meet the Red Sox in the World Series, why couldn't the Vikings pull off something similar?
If you ignore everything that happened to the Red Sox before the 60s, they have some similarities to the postseason failure of the Red Sox. The last four times the Red Sox got to the World Series, they lost in seven games.
Their losses have been fairly dramatic, too. From a ninth-inning base hit in Game 7, 1975, to a 10th-inning error in Game 6, 1986, the Red Sox have been tantalizingly close to the title, only to see it snatched away from them.
The Vikings never have been that close to the title - in their four Super Bowl losses, they've never so much as had the lead - but the Purple sure know about heartbreak.
In the 1998 season, there was that inexplicable championship game against the Atlanta Falcons, in which about 20 things had to happen, in sequence, for the Falcons to beat the 15-1 Vikings in the Dome. Naturally, all those things happened, in order. The details are too messy to explore any further.
I also refuse to talk about the 2000 title game. Seriously - that never happened. There was also a near miss in 1987, but 1987 was a good sports year, so we won't focus on the negative.
In 1975, though, the biggest shocker came, one that truly defines the near-miss history of the Vikings.
Have you ever heard of a Hail Mary pass in football? If you have, you probably didn't know that you have the Vikings to thank for putting that term into the football vocabulary forever.
Again, the details are too messy to get into, but they involve the Dallas Cowboys, a whiskey bottle and man named Drew Pearson, whose name I'm not allowed to mention in the presence of my father.
The Red Sox have their own version of Pearson. He is Bucky Dent, who hit the home run for the New York Yankees in the 1978 playoff at Fenway Park. To this day, most Red Sox fans firmly believe that Dent's middle name is ... something my editors won't let me print. We don't know yet if the Red Sox and Cubs will meet in the World Series, and even if they do, it won't mean that the Vikings are destined for greatness.
But it would be nice to dream, wouldn't it?
Ahrens is a senior print journalism major and a chief copy editor of The Spectator. "From the Sidelines" appears every Thursday.
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