Fifteen years ago today I had Yankee pot roast for dinner at Ruby Tuesday. It was Parents’ Day at the University of Delaware and after going to the football game for a little bit, my parents and I went out for a “real” dinner at the local mall and then I pushed them out quickly because the first pitch of Game 6 of the 1996 World Series was going to happen and they had two hours to get home to see it. No one should miss even a second of a possible World Series clincher, especially when their team hadn’t been in that position in, oh, 18 years.
I was lucky that year – I lived in a dorm with quite a few Yankee fans, as opposed to the year before, when I experienced Edgar Martinez-induced angst amongst many smug and gloating Orioles fans. So as the game progressed, people were in and out of my room, I was in and out of theirs. It was the strangest feeling that night, being wound up like a spring, eyes bugging out, but not really talking, not really wanting to believe what could happen lest the Braves make a comeback.
And then John Wettland came in and made things exciting. I couldn’t sit. I clung to the corner of the cinderblock wall in my dorm room like my life depended on it. Mark Lemke would NOT go quietly. And then, and then…
Here’s what I remember about the ball hitting Charlie Hayes’ glove: Screaming. Me screaming. My dormmates in my building screaming. A friend of mine said he was walking across campus when it happened, heard the collective roar and was like “Oh, the Yankees must’ve just won the World Series.” I ran around hugging and high-fiving various people on my floor. I high-fived my friend’s forehead by accident. I called my parents at the party they were at and screamed my thanks at my father for making me a Yankees fan. I sprinted up to the third floor, my feet not touching the stairs, and hugged and high-fived all the Yankees fans there. I will never forget the smell of that stairwell, either, as it now just reminds me of utter joy, where before it was just an old stairwell smell. I’m not sure there’s ever been a moment of my life where years and years of emotion added up to that one explosive moment in victory, especially since it was so unexpected, given what had happened in the first two games of the Series. There’s no replicating that kind of delight, to be sure.
Fifteen years later, it still makes me smile.
