The Cubs and Indians played a dream World Series

CLEVELAND — The Chicago Cubs, the best team in baseball, won the World Series. This is going to look a lot less mysterious to future generations, when they look back at the standings, the stats, the eventual careers these players will have. Decades from now, the future folk might not remember what a Bryan Shaw is, but they might know Kris Bryant, and they’ll look at the 2016 Cubs and nothing will seem out of place. What a fine team, they might remark.

The rest of us will just sit here, blinking a lot and shivering, until the future folk find us and give us water and sustenance. Because the Cubs just won the World Series, and the fabric of reality is in tatters, and there are kittens playing with the tatters. The Cubs. The Cubs won the World Series.

CLEVELAND — In your life as a sports fan, whomever you root for, my only wish for you is that you never experience anything as gnarly as the collective gasp of Indians fans in the first inning of Game 6. It should be an adage, a way to say goodbye, passed down from generation to generation until people who don’t know why they’re saying it do so out of habit and tradition.

The sound will haunt me for the rest of my days, as if I’ve watched the videotape from The Ring. There were two strikes and two outs. It was loud, it was loud, it was as loud as I’ve ever heard a ballpark, the kind of loud that’s steeped in catharsis and of shedding those decades of being the punchline, of finally getting that chance to float to the top of the stagnant, sad water and breathe deep of delights of which you’ve never dreamed and ...

CHICAGO — The lines to get into the Wrigleyville bars weren’t as long, the woo-hoos weren’t as organic, the high-fives less automatic. Before the game, the ticket prices on the secondary market were a little depressed, the patios weren’t overflowing quite in the same way, and the pre-game shrieking was somewhat muted. Chicago was finally down to a “normal World Series host city” level.

Maybe that’s because it was a football Sunday, or maybe it was because it was a work night, or maybe it was because sustaining that kind of three-day revelry is impossible for anyone, even Cubs fans hopped up on fermented pennant juice.

CHICAGO — We knew going into this World Series that either the Indians or Cubs were going to win, and that one of them was going to join the White Sox and Red Sox at the table of the nouveau riche, forgetting where they came from, ignoring all the little people they stepped on to get there. It was going to be weird. But for only one of the teams.

For one of the teams it was going to be so very familiar.