Curses! Foiled Again. And Again.

The T shirt reads: "ANY TEAM CAN HAVE A BAD CENTURY." I liked that sentiment until I realized that it might apply to this century, too. In the 1960s, I grew up a few blocks from Wrigley Field and got badly infected. In the 1975 World Series, I was in Fenway Park when Carlton Fisk hit his famous but ultimately futile homer in Game 6 for the Red Sox, my favorite AL club. Last week both teams choked with three-run leads and only five outs to go before bringing a pennant to their famished fans. Call me a two-time loser.

Actually, call me a combined 180-season loser still plumbing the depths of masochistic superstitional narcissicism.

On Wednesday, after witnessing the excruciating eight-run eighth, I asked 500 kids at Chicago's Francis W. Parker School how many blamed themselves in some way for the collapse. Had they worn something different that day? Eaten a new snack in front of the TV? Sat on the couch instead of the chair? Nearly three quarters raised their hands. Of course, the Cub swoon wasn't their fault but mine, as always. This is the lot of all sports fans, especially in Godforsaken places like Chicago and Boston. We only destroy the ones we love.

The defining characteristic of fanaticism--in the Middle East or the Middle West--is that it turns reality on its head. We convince ourselves that we somehow influence how superstars put runs on the board. But when it comes to something in our own lives, we assume we're powerless to change the outcome. We can control Pedro Martinez's pitching but can't possibly prevent ourselves from reaching for another potato chip.

This is one reason "The Fan" in Chicago took so much abuse for the sixth-game fiasco that he may have to go into the Witness Protection Program. Instead of blaming Alex Gonzalez for booting a grounder or Mark Prior for throwing a wild pitch or even the umpire for not calling interference, Chicagoans settled on 26-year-old "Steve Bartman." I don't believe that's his real name. It's too perfect a combination of Bart Simpson and Everyman.

My colleague Mark Starr suggests on his NEWSWEEK.com sports blog that the Cubs were dead when they, too, bought into fan narcissism. "It was [Moises] Alou's finger-pointing [that] helped put the Cubs in the psychic crapper," he writes. "With their heads out of the ballgame and back in the stands contemplating the baseball cosmos," they were toast.