I got the message Tuesday afternoon in the middle of a meeting… Dave, I’ve got two tickets for game 4 that will be delivered tonight after 10 pm, if you and George (the owner of my company) would like them, let’s figure out how you can get them picked up.  Do we want them?  Are you crazy?  Did you even have to ask?  The next morning I was at the airport at 6:00 am and off to get them, had to be back by 9:00 for a can’t miss meeting.

After what seemed like a day at work that would never end, George and I set out for St. Louis, driving right into the rain, and more rain, and even more rain.  We listened to the weather forecasters on the radio talk about the possibility that the weather on Thursday and Friday would be even worse.  Actually, they weren’t even predicting a possibility; they were all but guaranteeing that it would be.  Thankfully, the weathermen, like the sports prognosticators that said the Cardinals had no chance in the post season, were also wrong.

Listening to the dooms-day weather forecasts coming in for the week got me nervous.  This marked the third time that I had tickets to see the Cards play in the World Series and the first two sets I never got to use.  In 1996 I watched the Cards, up three games to one, collapse against the Braves, as I held on to tickets for all the games to be played at Busch.  In 2000 it happened again.  As we clutched our World Series tickets hopefully, the Mets dispatched of the Cards in the NLCS without much of a fight.  All I could think about is the weather somehow messing this World Series up so that I wouldn’t be able to use these tickets either.  Nobody was sure how the games would get rescheduled and with the luck I had been having with Series tickets I just felt that somehow Bud Selig (he who called an All Star game a tie), would have some shocking way of determining how to reschedule the games that would preempt me from going for the third time.  We sat at Busch stadium that night for over three hours before we learned that there would officially be no game that night.  George and I did enjoy ourselves that night; there was plenty of partying and pre-game festivities before the wash-out.

In a surprise move, the next day my boss handed me his ticket and said it was for my wife to go next time.  He’d seen the Cardinals play the Brewers in the 82 series and after our rain-out party on Wednesday was ready to let somebody else have the experience.

Thursday night I watched the, now game 4, play out with Kerri and my daughter.  An anxious night with a lot of pacing and ups and downs turned out the way we were hoping.  As Wainwright finished off the Tigers the reality set in, we were going to see the Cards with a chance to end it all right in front of us.

Friday came and it was rain again.  At least there was a bit of relief as I accepted the fact that Selig was not going to do anything crazy and decide to go ahead and send the series back to Detroit before playing another one in St. Louis.  I guess changing the rules in the All-Star game had taught him a lesson!  As the day moved on the forecast keep getting better and better, finally it was official, there was going to be baseball.

Traffic was crazy and the streets were full of people when we got downtown.  We found a spot in a parking garage, and in my own personal “nod” to this team, I refused to back into my parking spot, we weren’t backing into anything, we were going head into it!  Tana and I found our way to our seats on the third base line and settled in for the game.  Right from the start the crowd was into the game. 

Weaver mowed down the first three in the lineup and the Cards were quickly on the offensive.  When Verlander managed to get off the hook without a run scored on him, leaving the bases loaded, I thought that would deflate the crowd.  But these were Cardinal fans, and just like their team had done all year, they were not going to go away and nothing was going to make them give up.  These fans rose to their feet every time the team needed a boost.  The only time the crowd fell silent all evening long was after Duncan’s error set up the Casey two-run blast.  That was short lived.  By the time that Casey circled the bases and the umpire threw Weaver a new ball, the crowd was back up and encouraging their team not to give up.

When St. Louis rebounded immediately in the bottom half of the 4^th with two runs of their own you could feel it.  It was everywhere and everybody watching seemed to know it.  Even the Detroit fan sitting next to me said that this was our night.   A bit of insurance in the 7^th inning and seats at Busch Stadium became the most useless items in Missouri, there wasn’t a single one used for the rest of the night.  It was so loud I figured that they could hear us across the river in East St. Louis.

In the only manner that one would expect from this year’s team, the final out never seemed to be a given with the go ahead run at the plate before Wainwright sealed the deal.  The stadium erupted and the mob began.  The sirens went off and the fireworks blew-up, lighting up the sky over the stadium.  The team that the sports experts had said “backed” into the playoffs and shouldn’t have made it out of the first round had won the World Series, and won it with a convincing four games to one. 

Nobody was leaving; this party was going to go all night long.  We saw more emotion from Tony LaRussa this post-season that we have in his entire tenure with the Cardinals, and that continued into the celebration after the game.  This was his crowning moment as a manager, he held this team together through all the trials and injuries this season, yet all he could manage to talk about was his team and their heart.  Albert Pujols was on the stage and all he could talk about was his team and them being warriors.  Warriors seemed to be such an appropriate label for this team.  Battles aren’t pretty, but the true warriors don’t give up no matter the odds or the casualties, the best ones find ways to win the war. 

An hour later and the stands were still packed and the crowd was still as loud.  We kept celebrating the little guy that won the MVP, the reclamation project that was lights-out as a game 5 starter, the surprise clutch performances, the unknown bullpen, the underdog Cardinals. 

When we finally made our way out of the stadium we found the streets of St. Louis just as alive as the stadium had been.  Everywhere you turned there was celebration, music, cheering, dancing, just an enormous party.  A party where everybody we passe on the street was now our best friend.  We had never seen them before tonight, but we were all a part of Cardinal Nation and this was St. Louis’s time.  My friends and I celebrated all night long.  At some point after 4 am I finally fell asleep.  I woke up with the same, shocked feeling in me, stunned that it had happened, blown-away by the fact that I was actually there when it did happen.  The series of events had unfolded in an unpredictable way from spring-training to the end of the season, to the way my game four ticket gained me and my wife admission to the fifth and final game of the 2006 World Series.

It was a once in a life-time experience for me and Tana, and definately a Cardinal fan's dream come true, thanks for letting me share it with you.