Ithaca Mafia.

“Red Sox Nation is a savvy marketing operation, not a functional civic enterprise. Josh Beckett signed a professional contract with the Red Sox, not a social one. And he is not a member of our families. Or if he is, it’s the old kind of Red Sox family, the one with cold and distant patriarchs, like Ted Williams or Roger Clemens. The kind of family that’s inescapable, and that you dread a little, even if you love it. The kind with dads that go play golf when they damn well please and you can just deal with it.”

“It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitive as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look—I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring—caring deeply and passionately, really caring—which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naivete—the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball — seems a small price to pay for such a gift.”