Curse be damned?ro;”let's end this once and for all.

In the annals of man's eternal quest for salvation, it's sometimes happened this way. In the very darkest hour, the tide will suddenly take a turn for good when a lone, suffering citizen decides in his misery to pick up his pen. Think of Thoreau in his jail cell writing Essay on Civil Disobedience, think of Mandela, think of Thomas Paine. An accident of fate compels one humble person to quietly confront the demons of existence? And with a single page, a few simple declarative sentences, the Way is shown and a people are rallied.

And as I sit here now in Manchester, NH, just an hour or so after the latest historic collapse of the Boston Red Sox, I wonder if it has not now fallen to me to take up arms with the Truth on behalf of my fellow citizens in Red Sox Nation. The setting is correct. I'm alone in a dingy room of the Manchester flophouse I chose as my home during the Democratic primaries. There is a communal kitchen, and the bathroom I share with 30 others is covered in grime and mold; the drain in the shower is clogged with matted gray hair. Outside, the streets are quiet. New Hampshire, like all of New England, is too miserable even for drinking.

I think it is time that all of us who call ourselves Red Sox fans?and as I write this I even think with sympathy of my colleague, Russ Smith?come to terms with the eternal nature of our predicament. What just happened to us is surely a message from our Creator. If it had happened any other way, we might have chalked it up to the breaks of the game and set our sights on next year. It's clear now that there is no next year for the Boston Red Sox. There's just one year?endlessly replayed. There is some fatal mutation in the DNA of this franchise, and it is high time we took the poor animal outside, gave it one last doggy treat and put a bullet it its brain.

As Red Sox fans, we have lost our ability to distinguish between the beloved organism and the disease that inhabits it. Billy was a faithful dog, a devoted and much-loved friend of every last member of our family, but if we do not get rid of him now, he will wipe out all of civilization. We have to turn a blind eye to everything but the disease and attack it with, no pun intended, all necessary ruthlessness.

This is not merely a matter of vowing to never take the team seriously again, of switching to the Patriots and the Celtics. That isn't final enough; the disease could still recur. We have to round up every living member of the Red Sox, from current and former teams (excepting those who were cured by playing for the Yankees) and purify their flesh in a public place. Think of the end scene from Spartacus?except that the road away from Rome is the Mass Pike, and they are the half-burned bodies of Manny Ramirez, Jason Varitek, Lou Merloni and a thousand others crucified on telephone poles in a long line of death that leads out to and beyond the horizon.

Fenway Park should be treated much as the site of an anthrax outbreak. The field where the animals died must be set ablaze and then walled off with concrete and barbed wire, with signs posted in 50 languages warning all who approach that human beings must never again set foot on this ground. In a thousand years it may look like a grassy veranda covered with lilies, but the very first person who kicks off his shoes and skips through it under the sun will wake up the next morning covered with sores and imbued with an uncontrollable urge to fail spectacularly under pressure.

We can have baseball again, just as we can get another dog. There is, in fact, a team out there waiting for us to take it home. A year, perhaps two years, after the Red Sox are dead and buried, we can build a soulless corporate complex of the type we in New England seem to enjoy building as of late (see the Fleet Center and Gillette Stadium) and bring the Montreal Expos in to occupy it. The Expos, now there's a wonderful sports franchise: overachieving, loaded with anonymous young talent, utterly bereft of psychic burdens. Let them keep their pale blue uniforms, let them keep their entire identity intact. In fact, don't even call them the Boston Expos, but the New England Expos. (That's as close to "Montreal" as we can make it.) Then let's go to their games and just politely enjoy their efforts. Appreciate baseball for the sake of it; enjoy watching a nicely turned double play, a throw into third from deep right field. Winning is a bonus we'd take, but let's not make it necessary or even important.

Above all, let's stay in the National League, so that in the American League we can give our allegiance to the team that deserves it, the wonderful, fundamentally sound New York Yankees. We will be able to root for the Yankees once the Red Sox are gone, because part of us will be in them. They swallowed our souls.

Morning. I have just spent eight hours of sleep mired in the eighth inning of last night's game. I must have seen 10,000 doubles by Hideki Matsui. Hideki Matsui! He's not even American! How can he be part of this? How is it that he can be born halfway around the globe, live for nearly 30 years without the slightest inkling of the Rivalry, and then suddenly step off a plane and jump right into character on the other side? How come he can do that, while no matter where I go, no matter how far I travel, I'm stuck behind an eternal tv-38 broadcast of Mike Torrez turning around and watching the ball plop into the Monster Screen? This is something straight out of Kafka: This gateway to the Law was built specifically for me. And all across New England, there are people standing before their own gatekeepers, rapidly shrinking with age as they wait for the deliverance that never comes.

Nine years ago I moved to outer Mongolia. It was an unspoiled paradise where I found true happiness for the first time. In the morning I would go out onto my balcony in Ulan Bator with a cup of hot tea, and I would sometimes find a golden eagle perched on my window sill. It seemed like every day, nature would cast a little wink my way, letting me know I was close to heaven. I'd be on my way home from picking up groceries, and an elk would be standing in front of me on the street, lazily watching my progress. Man and nature coexisted peacefully; this was the ark surrounded by the flood.

And then one day I ran into an American in the Peace Corps. He was from Brockton, MA. Upset, he told me that he had received word from home that Roger Clemens had just signed with the Blue Jays. "He's going to have a great year there, I just know it," he said, shaking his head.

I laughed at him. Who cared? To hell with Roger Clemens! I hoped he went 50-0 in the Skydome.

Shortly after that, I contracted a serious lung disease, lost 40 pounds and nearly died. I had to be airlifted back to Boston for an operation to save my life. I emerged from the hospital physically well?but a Red Sox fan again. Reports of spring training had leaked into my room, which, incidentally, was in the quarantine ward. I wish they had let me die.