A Different Kind of Faith

Diary Entry: November 2, 2016

The political tension accumulated on campus hung like a thick, toxic fog, stagnating like a swamp. But tonight, this oppressive stillness was violently punctured by an entirely unique breed of collective hysteria.

I was sitting in my dorm room, deeply immersed in the dry, lifeless linguistics of court decisions, when a strange sound bled through from below. It wasn’t the sharp, articulate anger characteristic of a protest; it was a raw, primal roar.

I moved to the window. Down below on the street, silhouettes of people were spilling out and rapidly coalescing into a single, kinetic mass.

Their chants were hoarse, bordering on the ecstatic.

“We won!”

Then came a brief pause, followed by a deafening, profane echo: “Fuck it! We won!”

It took me a few seconds to tether this chaos to a specific event. The Cubs — a century-long drought, ended suddenly and so spectacularly.

My thoughts immediately drifted to my professor; the one who carried his loyalty to the Cubs like a heavy generational burden, a symbol of faith long resigned to misfortune. I tried to imagine what he was feeling in that exact moment — wondering whether his unperturbed, academic composure had finally cracked.