Yankees must be facing their own curse

October 20, 2004: A day that will live in infamy. And all the more so as barely a weekend earlier my father and I had cackled over the Boston Globe's delightful description of Yankee-struck baseballs flying "hither and yon," of the "brontosaurus egg" that was the 0-3 deficit, and yes, of the "C-word." No doubt about it: The Curse was alive and well.

Such it was that four days before the end of the American League Championship Series, I was at the height of my glory, reveling in the mystical Yankee-centric vision of the sports cosmos that had first drawn me into baseball fanaticism.

For the uninitiated, Yankee theology explains why, despite their occasional slides into utter incompetence, the Yankees are the cicadas of the playoffs. Ubiquitous. The Yankees have no need of actually being the best team, as they enjoy the favor of the baseball gods. They are simply transcendent. I believed fully.

It was this quasi-religious faith in the Yankee gods which later kept my sports interest on life support even as my natural cynicism attempted to stamp out any and all affection for professional athletics. And so, overwhelmed by midterms and underwhelmed by other aspects of my Princeton life, including but not limited to interaction with the opposite sex, I tuned into game four. The Yanks would not disappoint.

Or so I thought. Or so we all thought!

Is there anyone who can honestly say that they believed this was still "The Year" for the Red Sox?

Bob Ryan, the poetic Globe columnist who penned the article previously described, certainly didn't. Come on, even the most ardent of Sox die-hards had died. Hard.

And then we didn't win Game four.

And then we didn't win game five.

And then we didn't win game six.

But all was well. We were toying with them. Yes, we. I was a Yankee fan, and as such was an integral component of the sacred Yankee order and had no need of either midterm success or boyfriend to justify my own existence. And then the Yankees, and I, came in second in game seven.

First reaction: The Curse was shattered. Sad, really, but somewhat comforting. The Yankees will return. And be all the more transcendent and glorious. There's a word for this: "denial."

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Then came the truly blasphemous realization: The Curse could not possibly have been broken, as we hadn't recently traded any Ruth-like talent up north. There was, however, only one other possibility. When all was said and done, the Yankee mystique was just that: mystique.

And all of a sudden I was just some major-less sophomore who hadn't studied for any of her midterms and who couldn't even look forward to a good Thursday-night hookup. My certainty in Yankee dogma, my fundamental doctrines, even my conviction in moral absolutism, were all in pieces. I had lost the faith.

Yet overnight, I seem to have healed. I have pulled myself together at least enough to write this article to avoid studying for yet another doomed exam, have I not?

A miracle cure? No. Instead, a realization that my all-time favorite Bomber, Tino Martinez, had (kind of) recently been traded in a most Ruth-like fashion. The Yankee were still out there, but rather like their Grecian equivalents they were fickle. Yesterday's loss was punishment of the hubris of the all-too-mortal Steinbrenner for his despicable trade of my first-base hero. We are simply suffering the curse of Tino Martinez.

Phew! Crisis of faith over. For now. Dana Berkowitz is a sophomore from Old Tappan, N.J. She can be reached at deberkow@princeton.edu.