Once he'd regained his composure, Burns also chose the election. "I care most about my Republic," he said, "though the Red Sox are a passion. I woke up at 2:30 this morning, so depressed." When I told him that Goodwin too had connected the restlessness of baseball despair to the groggy divide between sleep and wakefulness, he said, "Yes, it is the waking thought. The waking moment goes to [the Red Sox]."

Burns continued, "It's interesting that you ask this question, Somehow I knew you were going to ... When I woke up at 2:30 there was just this pit in my stomach about baseball, and then I began to worry about the election as well, so they are clearly completely intertwined in my unconscious." But he maintained that rationally, there should be no comparison. "Baseball is a psychic release valve. To worry about the Red Sox is to have a healthy response to the terror of the moment, and I don't mean terrorism, I mean the terror of being alive. None of us are getting out of this alive. But sports and the continuity they represent help to mitigate impending doom. Politics is our attempt in our still-functioning democracy to actually affect the course of human events with political action. One has an abstract palliative nature; the other is a direct correlative to how we live and breathe and continue. So in the end I have to choose the political one, while my heart is all about the metaphoric one."

New Yorker writer Roger Angell was considerably brighter. "Well, I'm more of a Yankee fan these days, but Kerry really needs to win so I guess that's your answer," he wrote in an e-mail.

And through his representative, Boston author Dennis Lehane ("Mystic River") sent this response: "Unlike Fortunate Son, when Derek Jeter was drafted, he actually showed up at Yankee Stadium for duty and honored his whole contract, so I've got nothing against him (except for that scowling-ferret thing he does when he steps up to bat). Also the Yankees only screw Boston, not the whole country. So I'd take Kerry winning the Presidency any day."

And Democratic political consultant Jen Bluestein responded to my query with an immediate, "That's easy." "In my life, I have known Kerry to win, even, to be more precise, known him to be a good closer -- to keep me guessing right up until the last minute and then make it happen," said Bluestein, a Massachusetts native who lives in Brooklyn. "I have never had this experience with the Red Sox in my lifetime. So it's easier for me to give up the possibility of a Sox win this year in the hopes of having a Kerry presidency, because a Kerry victory seems possible, while a Red Sox victory is historically improbable, despite my prayers."

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