Cubs vs. Cardinals in playoffs is too much to grasp

The Chicago Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals have played each other 2,361 times in regular-season games, dating to 1892.

But this is something different. Oh my gosh, is this ever something different.

The National League playoffs. Cubs-Cards. Fans of the winning team will never forget it. Nor will fans of the loser, because fans of the winner will never let them.

I live in Cedar Rapids, which is almost the same distance from St. Louis as it is from Chicago. I have many warm memories of seeing baseball games in both cities with family and friends, as well as some in a working capacity back when the newspaper business was different than it is today.

Through my job, I got to meet Harry Caray and Jack Buck. You won't do better than that.

I interviewed Bill Murray at Wrigley Field. You won't do better than that.

I was 11 when I was with my dad, cousin and brother in Wrigley and we saw Ken Holtzman no-hit the Atlanta Braves in 1969. My dad, a Cubs fan who needed radio to follow his team in the 1945 World Series, claimed years later that he told us early in the game that we could have hot dogs just as soon as the Braves got a hit.

Once I got into the sportswriting racket, any allegiances I had to teams faded. I rooted for the Montreal Expos after 1976 because I went to Montreal for the Olympics and went to a couple of Expos games at what was perhaps the least-impressive major-league ballpark of all-time, Parc Jarry. They were horrible, and I liked them for it. There wouldn't be any wasting of emotion following pennant races.

The Expos are no more. Which taught me not to get attached to something to attached to because you didn't want to get attached to it.

I got into the sportswriting racket after college, and quickly came to realize teams at pro and college levels were full of parts that kept changing. Individuals were a lot more interesting. Many individuals, that is.

But I always liked going to Wrigley before WGN-TV turned up on everyone's cable system and the friendly confines became a national tourist mecca. It seems like at some point in the first half of my life, I visited Wrigley with every close friend I ever had. It was a place where you couldn't have a bad time, and it was always fun when it was your friend's first visit.

I liked going to games in St. Louis, too. The previous Busch Stadium wasn't the least bit charming, but it was so easy to reach by car. There were times I'd just drive down there by myself for a midweek series against a less-than-tantalizing opponent because I knew I could buy $5 outfield bleacher seats and have elbow room on a warm summer night.

My short attention span dates back to then. In the dark, dumb period of history before smartphones I'd take a newspaper or a book into the stadium and read between innings or during pitching changes. I'd move from section to section, eavesdrop on conversations, or join someone in listening to a portable radio that had Buck's call of the game.

Inevitably at some point in the game, someone would hit a home run into a section I had just left.

Cardinal baseball was a language everyone in greater St. Louis spoke, and I always liked that even if the team itself didn't tug at my heart.

I never did make much of an effort to learn what the city of St. Louis was really like, and didn't do much exploring. When Ferguson was in the news, it bothered me that I didn't remember ever passing through it, let alone get a feel for what it was like.

I'd get a motel 10 or 15 miles from the stadium on the Illinois side of the Mississippi in someplace safe and nondescript (and cheaper than downtown St. Louis) like Fairview Heights and have at least one meal each trip at a Steak ‘N Shake and another at a Bob Evans.

High times? Not quite. But those chains were and still are omnipresent in greater St. Louis, and when in Rome ...

As the years passed, I left baseball. Life just gets busier, and I lost interest in sitting in a ballpark for three hours.

Not that I wouldn't go back to Wrigley again if the situation was right and the company was good. But to go there now would remind me of days gone by with people who have either died or scattered in different directions, and there are too many other places to go and things to experience that I haven't yet seen or done.

For instance, Nashville. Everyone that's been there tells me it's a great city. And Montana. Never been there. Need to go. And Italy.

I hear good things about Tahiti, too.

Anyway, though Pittsburgh is a great city with a terrific ballpark, I was happy the Cubs beat the Pirates Wednesday night. Now it's the Cubs against the Cardinals in the postseason, a bizarre and wonderful thing.

The Cardinals have won so much, and here they are this year with a 100-game winner. They just won a World Series four years ago. Why are they so greedy?

I now know no one who remembers the ‘45 Series. If the Cubs got as far as the Series - and I fear the dirty dog Dodgers will be the NL representative - it would turn this part of the planet upside down.

That there is a team in American pro sports that hasn't finished the season as champions for 107 years is one of the greatest things going. Shoot, the Miami Marlins have won two World Series, and I have yet to meet a soul on this earth who is a Marlins fan. Yes, I've been to Miami a few times.

But to go year after year after year without winning a World Series, and to not have even reached the Series since 1945? That's fantastic!

No one has tried to burn down Wrigley out of frustration. If anything, the Cubs add more fans each year. You think everyone wants to be front-runners, needs to associate themselves with champions to feel better about their lives. But maybe more of us are more romantic than we realize.

Now, though, the Cubs are on equal footing with the Cardinals, with the winner of their best-of-5 skirmish headed to the NLCS. The current Cubs are a bunch of tough, talented kids who seem unaware their team was lousy last year, let alone most of the last seven decades. The way Jake Arrieta has pitched the last few months has been otherworldly and as un-Cub-like as we've ever seen from one of their players.

They're about to battle a Cardinals franchise that seemingly can take young men from off the street and turn them into champions.

Will the script finally flip? I don't know. But I do know we in Iowa are caught between the two cities and we'll feel the turbulence in the atmosphere from Friday until this series is finished.

If the Cubs win, you better hold on to something. Because life as we know it will have changed.

Should the Cubs win 11 more games and become world champions? There are no words in the English language that describe how that would feel. How could there be? None of us have ever experienced it.