Hope restored

So, I got distracted for a few days, had my momentum broken, and it's taken me over a week to get back to this story. Anyone surprised by this? If you are, you haven't really been paying attention recently...

Anyhow, if you're a Phillies fan, a baseball fan, or probably even a sports fan in general, you generally know how this part of the story ends. The story of how the baseball season ended in Philadelphia in 2007 is not exactly a secret, but here's how I walked through it.

In the immediate aftermath of that Monday night, as I was still going over in mind if what I thought had happened had REALLY happened, the Phillies proceeded to lose their next two games in impressive fashion, to the tune of being outscored 20-2. Let's just say that didn't really help my skepticism. At the end of play on September 12th, they were 7 games behind the Mets division lead with 17 games to play, which made that avenue to the playoffs seem pretty much done with. They were much closer in the wild card, but there were several teams in the mix, and let's just say that the Phillies weren't exactly inspiring confidence. So, the thought that it had been God speaking to me in the car a couple nights prior moved further into the back of my brain.

But baseball is a funny game, and things can change pretty quickly. They came back and won their next 6 games, including a 3 game sweep of the Mets, and suddenly the odds seemed more manageable, while still pretty long. Even as the doubter in me kept telling me that this whole thing was nuts, and that it probably wasn't going to come true anyhow, I remember clinging to it, hoping that it really was true. As a classic example, the 5th game in this 6th game win streak was against the Cardinals, and the Phillies came as close as you can to blowing an 11-0 lead, holding on to win 13-11. I remember being upstairs in my bedroom, following the game on my computer, and praying. It was as close as I'll ever actually come to praying for a particular outcome of a sports event, but that wasn't what I was doing. I wanted so badly for what I thought I had heard from God to be the truth.

As stated, they pulled out that game, and then the following, but a 3-3 stretch in the next games left them 2 out in the division and 1 out in the wild card with 5 games to play. Very possible, but they were going to need to play very well. Getting the division seemed out of the question, because the Mets were playing 2 very bad teams in their last 5 games - if they just went 3-2, the best the Phillies could do was tie them. But crazily enough, the Phillies won their next 2, and the Mets lost two games to the woeful Nationals, and when the Nationals came to Philly for the last 3 games of the season, the Phillies and Mets were tied for first place, the first day all year that the Phillies had been in first place.

Oddly enough, I had tickets to the first game of that final series, the last Friday game of the regular season. I'd had them for months - I had gotten tickets to 6 games in a package at the beginning of the season, one game each month, and had chosen this particular game hoping to catch a game in the pennant race, and man, had I gotten it right.

From the pure perspective of a fan, this was easily the best experience I've ever had a pro sporting event. The house was packed, the fans were absolutely electric, and absolutely everything went right for the Phillies that night. Cole Hamels was masterful, throwing 8 shutout innings with 13 strikeouts as the Phillies dominated the game 6-0. As an added bonus, the Marlins had jumped ahead of the Mets early, and we were tracking that game on the out of town scoreboard all night as well. It ended after the Phillies game, and so I was sitting in my car with the postgame show on the radio, and the announcement of the final score led to a massive wave of honking car horns, rally towels being waved out windows, etc. For the record, the car horn thing wasn't the best situation when you already had people trying to navigate out of a crowded parking lot and some horn honking going on with that, but to the best of my knowledge, there were no accidents.

From the perspective of this journey I was on, this was the night that I finally fully embraced what I believed that God had said to me 18 days earlier. As I took everything in, even as the Phillies fan in me was going over all the things that could go wrong over the next 2 days, I found myself overwhelmed with the sense that I knew this was going to happen, and the trip home down the Turnpike was almost its own worship service.

The following day, my folks came up to my house to watch the game with me, hoping for the possibility of seeing the Phillies clinch the division. Unfortunately, that possibility had already gone out the window before the Phillies even took the field, since the Mets had won their game (in grand fashion, in fact, by the score of 13-0). They still had a chance, however, to ensure no worse than a tie for the division, which would force a 1 game playoff against the Mets. In true Phillie fashion (it can never be simple or easy), they played their worst game in the recent stretch, lost to the Nationals, and feel back into a first place tie. As frustrated as I was with the result of that game, and as much as the Phillies fan in me was screaming "here we go again", I remember saying several times to my folks: "They're going to do it." It wasn't bravado, it wasn't me trying to talk myself into it, it was just a very flat statement of faith at that point. Admittedly, there was probably less confidence assigned to it than there might have been 18 hours before, but I believed it, nonetheless. I was resigned to the strong possibility that it would require a 1 game playoff, but I believed it would happen.

The next day, I watched as the Mets, who started their game a bit earlier in the Phillies, gave up 7 first inning runs to the same lowly Marlins team they had throttled the day before. (Like I said before, baseball is funny) Realizing that that would likely mean the Phillies could close out the deal today, I hung on every pitch in their game. They jumped out to an early lead, and the final outcome was never in doubt. The Mets game went final during the last inning, and as the Phillies recorded the final out and the celebration began, I was completely overcome with emotion. Now, understand, I'm a bigtime sports fan, and I've been known to have emotional reactions to this sort of thing before - but this was different. This was not simply the joy of watching my favorite baseball team end a 13 year playoff drought. I was overcome with the fulfillment of what I believed God had spoken to me a few weeks earlier, and what I believed that meant about my friend. The Phillies had come back from 7 games down with 17 games to play, the biggest September comeback in MLB history - a baseball "miracle" as it were.

Now, as I finish off this part of the story, let me make one thing clear - I don't believe, and never have, that God was out there manipulating baseball games for my benefit, or that he had some sort of direct hand in the Phillies winning the division back in 2007. I do, however, believe that God sees these things coming - and that he had used this particular event to speak to me right where I was at, and in an arena where he was sure to have my attention. Needless to say, the hopelessness I had felt at that September 10th meeting was now a distant memory.

I wish I could say that the reason I'm sharing this now, just over 2 years later, is because Lynn has been healed. Sadly, that is not yet the case. But it's not over yet either, and so I'll get into "the rest of the story" as I continue on.