If you weren't there -- or if you weren't reading my columns that season -- you might not believe this. But I was there, and I was writing the columns. So I can report, with 100 percent confidence, that seven years ago the word in Boston was that the Red Sox would never win a World Series, not while they were stuck with their old wreck of a ballpark.
Seriously. There might have been one newspaper columnist in Boston who didn't devote a few columns in the summer of 2000 to the argument that Fenway Park simply must be demolished. Maybe one. There might have been a couple of sports-radio hosts who didn't do the same thing. Maybe a couple of them. Or maybe not.
When I lived in Boston, I was a semi-regular guest with a particularly friendly host on WEEI, New England's No. 1 sports station. I would visit the studio, and hang around for a couple of hours. This gave us plenty of time to talk about baseball, and mostly the Red Sox. For as long as I'm alive, I'll not forget an exchange we had one evening on the air.