He had been angry with himself for not asking Norbert Doyle how it felt to be part of the team but not part of the team.

“Don’t feel bad,” Kelleher had said when Stevie lamented his inability to think or act faster. “No one else saw it as a story either. He’ll probably be around for the World Series. You can do a sidebar on him from there if you still think it’s worth doing.”

The World Series was scheduled to begin in Boston the following Tuesday. If Stevie got two papers done for English and did all right on his Spanish test on Monday, he would fly up there on Tuesday morning. His parents weren’t thrilled with the idea that he would miss yet another week of school, but he knew his dad would stand by him as long as he wasn’t falling too far behind.

“Look, this is what Stevie wants to do someday,” his dad had said to his mom when the chance to go to the playoffs had come up. “He’s already proven he’s good at it, so this is as much a learning experience as school is for him right now.”

“Bill, you’re rationalizing,” his mom had said. “He doesn’t need to cover every event.”

“I know,” his dad had answered. “But let’s be honest. How many kids have this kind of opportunity? He loves it and I think we should support him.”

His mother had finally bought in-at least enough to agree to let him go. Stevie knew his mom didn’t exactly understand his fascination with sports and sportswriting, and she hadn’t been thrilled at all by the various scrapes he and Susan Carol had gotten into, but he also knew that deep down she was proud of him. His father, on the other hand, loved every second of it.

“If you can’t be a great athlete, the next-best thing is getting to tell their stories,” Bill Thomas said. “Sometimes I wish I’d tried sportswriting instead of going to law school.”

Stevie wasn’t worried about a career path right now, just ninth-grade English and Spanish.

Susan Carol was talking, and he realized he’d been day-dreaming, looking out the window. “Just make sure you get your work done this weekend,” he heard her say. “I don’t want to go to the World Series without you.”

“Don’t worry,” he said, snapping back to attention. “I’ll be there for sure.”

“And don’t sulk,” she said. “You’ll get another shot at Doyle.”

Stevie wondered if Doyle would travel with the team to Boston. If not, he could try to talk to him when the series moved to Washington for game three.

“Yeah, you’re right,” he said finally. “I’ll be fine.”

“We’re pulling into school, gotta go,” she said, slipping into the Southern accent she tried to lose north of the Mason-Dixon Line.

“Talk to you later, Scarlett,” he said, unable to resist using the nickname he’d put on her when they first met.

She clicked off. Stevie closed his eyes again, smiling. But all he could see was Doyle being sprayed by champagne. Oh yeah, Steve Thomas, sportswriting genius… A moment later he was asleep.

The next few days crawled by for Stevie. After the excitement of the playoffs, being back at school was a complete bore.

The weekend was spent writing an English paper, which wasn’t nearly as much fun as writing a sidebar on game seven-even a bad sidebar-Stevie thought. His spirits picked up on Sunday morning when he spotted a headline in the Inquirer’s “World Series Notes and Quotes” column. It read: “Doyle to Be Activated.”

Stevie read the three-paragraph item raptly:

Norbert Doyle, the 38-year-old rookie acquired by the Nationals in late August, will be on the team’s roster for the World Series, manager Manny Acta said today. Acta said he decided to put Doyle on the roster instead of fifth starter Tom O’Toole because Doyle is more comfortable coming out of the bullpen than O’Toole.

“You really don’t need a fifth starter in postseason unless there’s an injury,” Acta said. “Tom only got into one game in the LCS [giving up two runs in 1⅓ innings of relief work in game three] and relieving really hasn’t been his role. Norbert’s been comfortable in any role we’ve put him in.”

Doyle, who had never made a major-league appearance prior to being traded to the Nationals in late August, pitched six times in September-three times in relief and three times as a starter. He was 0-0 with an ERA of 3.23.

That was it. Stevie was elated-for Doyle, who would now get to be part of a World Series as an active player, and for himself because he knew Doyle would be in Boston. Then it occurred to him that with Doyle on the active roster, he would be a natural story for anyone looking for a column or a sidebar. No one could resist the underdog-makes-good story line.

Still, he did have a little bit of an in with Doyle, if only because the pitcher had twins his age-one of whom had a crush on Susan Carol. All of that might help him once in Boston. He wouldn’t miss the story twice, that much he knew for sure.

When he wasn’t working on English or Spanish over the weekend, Stevie read everything he could get his hands on about the impending World Series. Once, the Red Sox had been baseball’s perennial hard-luck story: frequent contenders, never champions. Some years they simply collapsed in September. In others they made it to October only to break their fans’ hearts: they had lost the seventh game of a World Series four times-in 1946, 1967, 1975, and 1986.

The loss in ’86, especially, was a crusher. The Sox had had a three-games-to-two lead going into game six against the Mets and took a 5-3 lead in the tenth inning. When the first two Mets’ hitters in the bottom of the tenth were retired, the scoreboard operator at Shea Stadium, apparently forgetting there was still one out to go, flashed “Congratulations Boston Red Sox, 1986 World Champions” on the board.

The third out never happened. The Mets got three straight singles, Bill Buckner made an infamous error, and the Mets won the game 6-5. Two nights later, with the Red Sox leading 3-0, the Mets came back to win game seven and crush Boston ’s hopes once again.

It all changed in Boston in the fall of 2004. That October the Red Sox came back from three games down to beat the lordly New York Yankees in the American League Championship Series and went on to finally win the World Series for the first time in eighty-six years.

It was the end of the much-talked-about Curse of the Bambino. A year after winning the 1918 World Series, the Red Sox had traded the great Babe Ruth to the Yankees. Acquiring Ruth had turned the Yankees from a struggling franchise into a dominant one. Yankee Stadium was built in 1923, and it became known as the House That Ruth Built. From 1919 until 2004 the Yankees won twenty-six World Series; the Red Sox, none. The Sox’s long drought had begun with the trade of Ruth-and rumors of a curse were born.

But now the Red Sox were four victories away from winning their third World Series title in six years. In a sense, they had become the Yankees: the team with lots of money, lots of stars, and the swagger of past championships. The Nationals, on the other hand, were the quintessential underdog. They had been awful for years-first while playing in Montreal, then after moving to Washington in 2005. They had been picked to finish last in the National League East before the season began and had shocked people by winning the division title.

They had won fourteen of their last sixteen games to sail past the Mets-who ended up making the playoffs as the wild card team-and the Phillies. The Nats’ young pitchers all seemed to come into their own at once, and they pulled out one improbable win after another, including a late-September victory in which Johan Santana pitched the first no-hitter in Mets club history, only to lose the game 1-0 when the Nationals scored in the ninth inning on an error, a stolen base, a sacrifice bunt, and a sacrifice fly.

In the playoffs they had trailed the Chicago Cubs two games to none in the best-of-five Division Series before rallying to win, and then had pulled off their miraculous seventh-game victory in the League Championship Series.