Let’s Just Enjoy

Yes, we’re delighted the Angels are flying high right into the World Series right here in Southern California today. Of course, we’re cheering. But before fans start yelling, before thunder sticks start thundering, before beers and scoreboard animations start affecting crowd behavior, let’s appreciate what’s really happening.

We’re a nation at war confronting trials, legal and otherwise. Terrorists attack oil tankers, buses, nightclubs. Election-year politics are over-combative and unproductive. Stocks tumble. One of the losers running for governor will win. Corporate officers lie. Even Martha Stewart may have cheated, though her kitchen looked great all the while. Nobel Prizes for biology inspire, but only eight people understand “suicide cells.” Americans are lethally overweight, gang murders mount and the Washington-area sniper and Osama bin Laden elude captors.

Now comes an amazing feel-good series. You needn’t be a baseball fan -- and most of us aren’t -- to enjoy underdog, jinxed angels facing earnest, overachieving giants, the first World Series of wildcards. We’ve got teams named for socks, sailors, birds, evil fish and poisonous snakes.

Only Californians who prize rainy Sundays can cheer against angels. Nothing against San Franciscans; they’re like neighbors down the street -- you wave and smile but don’t really care.

TV presents sports as winning and losing, plus gobs of fame and money. Real fans, especially Angels fans, know that sports, like life, are more about enduring, getting by, getting back up, trying again, hanging in, hoping.

None of us will be here when the Cubs reach the World Series. So let’s celebrate Angels who’ve endured bad luck, bad plays, bad management, bad calls, bad trades and poor crowds. It may be just in California, but this series seems more like an old-fashioned Sunday dinner when familiar family faces gathered to share memories and mark the start of yet another week together.

Sports are supposed to be something to care about in passing, to avoid thinking about other things or listening to a spouse who’s no fan. Sports are businesses for owners, lucrative games for players and distractions for the rest of us.

The games are fun to watch. They happen right now before our eyes -- no editing, no laugh or applause tracks, none of the careful, calculated choreography that characterizes so much of our lives, in watching sitcoms, attending meetings and observing politics.

Now, we’ll witness two come-from-behind teams battling for a transient symbolic supremacy, two groups of disparate athletes, some young, some old, who’ve endured losses and weak expectations but got up again, now in the biggest games of their lives. These are games, meant to be played and enjoyed. So let’s do it.

And may the most heavenly team win.