The worst seat in the house wasn't behind one of those pesky obstructions. It wasn't in the press overflow room, which had no view at all. It wasn't even an SRO spot along the railing in the 200 section.
No, the worst seat in Wrigley Field on Wednesday evening was right behind the visitor's dugout, in the millionaires' seats, anywhere near freaking Tommy Lasorda.
Can you imagine?
You're a diehard Cubs fan, shelling out the equivalent to a year's tuition to the University of Chicago for your season tickets - tack on a year at DePaul for your playoff seats - and you have to sit behind Mr. Slim Fast, jiggling and jostling as his Dodgers rack up some screw-you runs. He was the Daniel Plainview of the North Side on Wednesday, drinking your milkshake, drinking it up.
Dodgers 7, Cubs 2.
If you're a Cubs fan, just stop there. That's all that needs to be said about this game, this culmination of every fan's nightmares, every sportswriter's sarcastic barb and every well-worn myth about the Cubs, the team that can't win the big one. History's proved it, time and time again.
All that was missing on this cold night was a black cat wearing headphones knocking down Mark DeRosa's homer and Kerry Wood's arm falling off.
The fun-loving Ryan Dempster took the loss. He took it pretty hard actually, telling reporters, "I really let the guys down today."
Dempster was given the starting nod over Carlos Zambrano because he was 14-3 at home this year and the team's most reliable starter. Dempster was supposed to be the responsible one. He wound up walking seven, three of those baserunners scored on James Loney's grand slam in the fifth that sucked the excitement out of a sold-out crowd and sent the Cubs to another playoff hole that could be really hard to climb out of, especially for a team that's never won a playoff game west of the Rockies (Not that the sample size is huge, but still ...).
Manny Ramirez golfed a curveball off his shoelaces for a homer in the seventh. Russell Martin added another in the ninth. Forget home field advantage, the Dodgers acted like they owned the place.
So now the Cubs are down 1-0 in a best-of-five series. The margin for error is the size of Jim Belushi's Oscar reel. The possibility for a Cubs-sized flameout is as big as Antonio Alfonseca's old pinstriped pants.
DeRosa would disagree, but he's a ballplayer and that's what he's paid for. He's supposed to hit home runs - he did his job there, slicing a two-run shot through the wind to give the Cubs a 2-0 lead in the second - and politely reject sports reporters limitless pessimism.
"Players don't think like that, they really don't," he said of curses, jinxes and that time-honored wait 'til next year attitude that permeates this franchise. "It's stuff that's written about, stuff that's talked about. But we play for the moment. We're not worried about 100 years. We'd love to give the Chicago fans a championship, not only for the guys in the clubhouse, but for everyone that follows this team."
Yeah, they hear you, Mark. Now it's time to prove it.
To observers, the Cubs looked tight again, reminiscent of last year's 3-0 sweep by Arizona, when the entire lineup could've shared a bat and sold it good as new.
"We just have to play more relaxed, play the game and have fun. Now's the time to have fun," argued Cubs outfielder Alfonso Soriano, who set the tone by going 0-for-5 with two strikeouts. "But the key is, we didn't play like we're supposed to play. We didn't play good. If we play good, we win the game."
That sounds about right. You play good, you win. Why haven't they thought about that this century?
Seriously, maybe everyone was asking too much. OK, definitely.
But this team has been so good all year, and the rest of the National League so average, it seemed predestined that in the 100th anniversary of the Cubs' last World Series title, they would win again and exorcise the old demons that have haunted this club and its fans for so long.
This was a new team, you were told, a new beginning. So why does it feel the same?
After it was over, the fans trudged out of Wrigley, beaten down, quiet. There was no pushing in the Cramped Confines and little hostility; in fact, far less than I expected. Even during the game, the boos seemed few and far between, given the stakes.
There is no way to gauge an entire fan base, to judge a crowd of individuals on its collective behavior. Surely some fans were angry, but mostly they just seemed resigned to their fate. Losers again. There's nothing lovable about a $100 million team tanking in October.
The good news is that Carlos Zambrano is on the mound Thursday night, and just maybe a pissed-off Big Z is better than a complacent one. Maybe this is the wakeup call this front-running team needs. Maybe everyone will be laughing about this game in a few weeks, pointing back to it and saying, "That was when they turned it around."
"It's simple," Soriano said. "We've got to try and win tomorrow and that's it."
Sounds good to me. Let's see it.