From Jason Stark, ESPN Senior Writer, “How did the Cubs’ curse end? With the greatest game ever”:
So there were the Cubs, two runs up and three outs away — but with Chapman exhausted and no obvious option to close out the game. These last three outs still held the potential for major agony.
At 12:33 a.m., out of the pen came rookie right-hander Carl Edwards to get them to within one out. But these are the Cubs, friends. Did you think this could possibly go 1-2-3? Edwards walked Brandon Guyer. Davis roped an RBI single. It was 8-7. And here came Joe Maddon one last time — at 12:44 a.m. — to summon his unlikely World Series closer, Montgomery.
“You know what’s funny?” Montgomery admitted later. “When I came in, I honestly didn’t realize it was a save situation. All I kept telling myself was, ‘I’ve just got to get one out.'”
At the plate stood the last man on Terry Francona’s bench, utility man Michael Martinez, a guy whose last hit had come more than seven weeks ago. Montgomery snapped off a curveball for strike one. He turned and smoothed the dirt on the mound with his spikes, then leaned in for the sign.
He spun off one final curveball, the Cubs’ 172nd pitch of the night. Martinez thunked it softly toward third base. Montgomery looked up, saw Bryant waiting to gobble it up and tried to process a thought shared by every Cubs fan in the universe: “I couldn’t believe it. I thought to myself, ‘It’s over!’ And at that point, it was just kind of madness.”
Yeah, that’s one word for it, anyway. Madness. Mayhem. Ecstasy. Heaven. Pick whatever description works. The Chicago Cubs had won the World Series, and won it the only way they could.
The hard way.
“I’m exhausted,” catcher David Ross said. “I feel like we just played for nine hours.”
But what’s another nine hours when a team has waited 39,465 days to win the World Series? All it took was a century of waiting, a remarkable climb out of a three-games-to-one hole and the greatest Game 7 ever played. But finally, at 12:47 a.m., Cubbie Daylight Time, the wait was over.
“You know what?” said the World Series MVP. “I think we just s–t-canned those curses.”
