[John Henry] was looking around the ballpark, taking in the details. He spotted Jason Varitek in the on-deck circle, getting himself ready, and then noticed a small bird that had hopped over and was standing in the on-deck circle with him. “See the bird?” he asked, smiling shyly.

Time only worked right when it had somewhere to go. Ideally, the future got to be the future and the past knew its place. But to any New England baseball fan, which was to say, just about anyone in New England, the past long ago overflowed its banks. People believed, really believed, that the pain and disappointment they held as a kind of collective birthright offered a reliable foretaste of what came next. It all went back to losing Babe Ruth to the Yankees for a wad of cash back in 1920, of course, and lived on in countless late-season collapses and Game Seven reality checks, summed up with coded phrases like “Bill Buckner” or “Bucky Dent.” The pain and disappointment were what people talked about most, but it might have been true that no single moment better summed up the mix of emotions that come with being a Red Sox fan than Ted William’s last game.