Sox Fans: Wear Your Colors

Many important details from 2005 went unreported, and among them: Cubs logos vanished from Chicago for a good six months. We traverse this city as frantically as ants, and from October 2005 to April 2006 we counted one poor sucker wearing a Cubs cap. Even the Tribune Store seemed to switch teams. Its windows were suddenly bursting with silver and black, not out of any sense of pride or propriety, mind you, but simply because that company will scarf any dollar it can smell. A very different motivation led Cubs fans to doff their silly blue pajamas and caps, it seems to me. They were ashamed and they were afraid of being put to shame by proud Sox fans.

Let's not be that chickenshit. If ever there were a moment to show our Sox pride, this is such a moment. I suppose this goes without saying for most Sox fans. We're accustomed to being beyond the pale, on the wrong side of the tracks, outside of the comfy illusion in which the privileged rubes wrap themselves, and we've always worn our colors in defiance rather than compliance.

Last night was somehow momentous for many in Chicago, even though it just seemed to consist of one mediocre team, the Milwaukee Brewers, lying down to let another mediocre team walk on its back into fantasyland. We spent last night in the best possible location for such an occasion: U.S. Cellular Field, watching Javier Vazquez shut down the Tigers and Paulie stroke one more line drive into the left-field seats.

The place was rocking and packed, almost sold out, which would have been impossible to imagine for a White Sox team with this record just three years ago. A few Cubs fans were there, chanting "Let's go Cubbies" and waving a Cubs flag, which just looked preposterous with that World Series trophy still shining in its display case. Despite the fact that the Tribune tries its mightiest to scare people away from U.S. Cellular Field, those Cubs fans left with all their teeth. Maybe The Cell is just a bit too safe, know what I mean? In the old stadium those fellows would have been swiftly dispatched to unconsciousness, but nowadays Sox fans just smiled and ignored them. Everything has changed. We won the nine-decades-long race and nothing that happens this year can change that. Even a championship can't redeem the Cubs now.

Let us not forget that this is Chicago, the city of hustle and muscle. The North Side is all hustle, as in trickery, where a crappy crumbling stadium is revered and losing is somehow lovable — the South Side all muscle, where our victories may be few but we know they're real. So in these days of ugliness, Sox fans, when the trickery claims to be trumping the true, wear your colors.

(And arm yourself with a response for the first dipstick you encounter who says, "go cubs.")