That being said, I'm peeved by the results. A famous Vince Lombardi quote pretty much sums up how I feel, "Show me a good loser, and I'll show you a loser."

The series was a bit like two baseball-themed movies in which the Yankees played the villains. In Brewster's Millions the Yanks lost an exhibition to Monty's Hackensack Bulls. And in Major League, the Indians squeeze-bunted their way past Clew Haywood and Co. to the American League pennant. (See, this is how big the Yankees are. The climax of the movie doesn't even have to be in the World Series. You think they'd ever make a basketball movie about the Nuggets beating the Lakers in the NBA's Western Conference Finals?)

Anyway, the series was a circus, and I was glad to see it as such. Sports should be a circus. Games should be fun, fans should root their asses off, celebrate for an evening and then return to real life.

Cubs fans, it seems to me, do it right. They need to work on their material — six months of waiting and all they come up with is Yankees suck? — and I told them so, but the number of friendly people in and around the Friendly Confines far outnumbered the ones who gave me the finger or tried to verbally harass me. I'm not sure if there's a Yankees fan alive who could get rattled by a supporter of a team that hasn't won a World Series in 95 years, but I ain't one of them.

I felt like someone traveling to see the University of Miami football team when they used to come to Syracuse. How does one heckle those guys? Hey, you guys haven't won a title in a year!

Before and after the games, we drank at a number of bars: Murphy's Bleachers, Sports Corner, Hi Tops, Sheffield's, Cubby Bear, Yak-zies; an assortment of sports bars that far supercedes anything surrounding Yankee Stadium. (One of the bartenders told us New Yorkers tip best. She said visitors from the closer neighboring states make her ears bleed by whining about the $4.50 beers.)

As for the stadium itself, it's very picturesque and comfy, and the rooftop viewers surrounding the outfield fences make it seem like everyone is town is focused on the affair. And I didn't see one fight, which is as much a credit to the locals as to the New York visitors, whom many expected to be obnoxious powder kegs. That simply was not the case, and we had thousands of people there.

So where does Wrigley rank among my favorite stadiums? Lower than Yankee Stadium. Because that's the way it should be. And Chicagoans should put their place No. 1. And Red Sox fans should love Fenway. Because those places have been home for us since we were kids. They've outlasted girlfriends and schools and jobs and all the ups and downs. Three hours in the park for me is the same now as it was 20 years ago. It might be the only place in the world where you really can go home again.