I had the poor forutune to watch the Red Sox win the World Series (have you heard about that?) in a hotel bar, far from my Sox-loving extended family, accompanied by Our Host,. The problem is, he’s the nicest, kindest, most generous person in the world. Perhaps you’re expecting a “But.” There is no “But.” When you’re watching the Red Sox win the World Series next to a Yankees fan, you would like that Yankees fan to be bitter, spiteful and sad. No such luck. (Although there had been a Yankees fan in the hotel bar earlier, who provided some schadenfreude jollies. I particularly relished our discussion of how runs, like cell phone minutes, do not carry over to the next game. )

Two days later, the morning after our show in Baltimore (nice to meet you, Murray) I woke up to two articles, in the NYTimes and USAToday, speculating that Red Sox fans might now be strangely unhappy, since we can’t complain about the Curse anymore. To understand the utter absurdity of this, consider the following thought experiment.

You have a good friend in high school, and despite his many charms, and decent looks, the guy just can’t get lucky. Not so bad, maybe; it’s just high school. But in college, too, he just can’t get laid. He begins to worry… is there something wrong with him? On into his twenties, and now he’s an anomaly, a famous statistical outlier, known as the unluckiest guy in the world. He gets tantalizingly close — one night, for example (say in October, 1986) he’s got a girl in the boudoir, happy and peppy and bursting with love… and the phone rings and her father’s had a stroke and she runs out of the room and the next day moves back to Muncie before entering a convent.

Some friends sympathize. Some others, less kind, mock. One guy from New York, who steals girls right from under him (so to speak), particularly likes to make fun of him.

Now he’s thirty. When he looks in the mirror, he sees a handsome, talented guy, with enough money and good personal hygeine. There’s no reason in the world he should be the world’s oldest virgin. But his bedpost remains unblemished by notches.

Then one night, he goes to a party, meets Barbarella — really, it’s her, the whole aluminum fishnet thing, the space age aluminum brassiere — takes her home, and spends the entire night spiking the graph of his pleasure centers.

Now. Do you think, as he lay there in his destroyed bedroom, the scent of Aldebaraan Musk Perfume in the air, that he would be sad that he couldn’t complain about it anymore?

Or do you think, like any normally constituted human, he would want to do it again as soon as possible?

Go Sox 2005!