It’s Still Hard for Him to Believe It

The reverberations of Game 7 involving the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees in this year’s American League championship series will be felt for years, at least if you believe the media in those two markets.

Long-suffering Red Sox fans -- and Boston columnists for that matter -- are still trying to cope with their favorite team actually winning.

“Game 7, 1975? Oh, yeah, I was there,” the Boston Globe’s Bob Ryan wrote. “Bucky Dent’s home run? Yup. Can’t claim that I eye-witnessed the Buckner game. I watched the fateful 10th inning in a Houston bar. I had just befriended a couple of locals and promised that I’d be buying as soon as this inning was over. When the ball rolled through Buckner’s legs, I just said, ‘Sorry, gotta go,’ and walked out the door.

“And then there was Game 7 a year ago. When David Ortiz hit the homer, I said, ‘That’s it, Can’t lose now.’ ”

More Ryan: “So that’s why I sit here in journalistic shock. I am trying to digest the fact that I have just seen the greatest team feat in the 101-year history of postseason baseball as we know it. A team that fell behind, three games to none, has come back to win a postseason series. That team is the Boston Red Sox, and the team they have just victimized is the New York Yankees.”

Trivia time: Which was the last team to break baseball’s color line?

Coachspeak: Northwestern is playing unbeaten Wisconsin today and Wildcat Coach Randy Walker apparently is impressed with the Badger defensive line.

“You can’t block those guys,” he said. “They have four great pass-rushers.... You’ve got two big boulders inside. Man, they’re explosive, they weigh 310 pounds. Big guys.... They have a great combination: big, strong guys inside and real fast guys on the edge. They’ve got 25 sacks? That’s unbelievable at this stage of the game.”

With the fishes: The New York Post’s Joel Sherman saw something familiar in the way Boston punished the Yankees.

“The Red Sox were Michael Corleone in the final scene of ‘The Godfather,’ settling all scores accumulated over 86 frustrating years,” he wrote.

Catch-22: With Utah at No. 7 in the BCS standings, Mountain West Conference football teams are in a peculiar spot. They want to hand the Utes their first loss, but they also want the $14.4-million payoff a spot in a BCS bowl game would afford the league. Nevada Las Vegas is at Utah today.

“We want to be the team that knocks them off and keeps them from going where they want to be,” UNLV Athletic Director Mike Hamrick told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “With that said, it would cost everybody a significant amount of money.”

Trivia answer: The Boston Red Sox, who played Pumpsie Green in 1959, 12 years after Jackie Robinson had made his debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

And finally: Fox Sports Radio’s Mychal Thompson, noted Yankee and President Bush supporter, on the Yankees’ collapse during the “Loose Cannons” show: “I haven’t seen this much choking and sputtering since W in the first debate.”