The mystic chords of Cubness

Look, I know the Curse is dead and rotting. They barbecued the billy goat and ate him. Harry floated down from his cloud and anointed the Friendly Confines with Budweiser. And they blew up the Bartman Ball.

But the Cubs are the Cubs are the Cubs, and winning the World Series in 2016 cannot break certain mystic chords of  Cubness.  If it's the playoffs, they're still gonna lose to the Marlins.

Which they did, scraping out just five hits yesterday in a 2-0 loss in Wrigley that gave the Marlins a sweep in the best-of-three NL wild-card series. In two games in the Empty Confines, the Bearcubs managed just one run on nine hits. They even sent their best pitcher, Yu Darvish, out there yesterday, and couldn't plate a tally for him.

It all unavoidably took you back to 2003, speaking of mystic chords. That was the year of Bartman and the Cubs losing two straight to the Fish in Wrigley, with their two best arms on the hill. Seventeen years later the sour mojo of that October struck again, as if it had permeated Wrigley's ancient girders and was simply waiting to seep out again.

This of course is nonsense to the rational mind. This time it was the Marlins who had the arms and the Cubs who didn't, nor the bats, either. And even if the Cubs won the NL Central and the Fish barely cleared .500 to snag a wild-card spot, there wasn't much to choose between them. The Marlins finished 31-29; the Cubs were just three Ws better at 34-26.

So maybe it wasn't sour mojo after all, but simple baseball canon: In a short series, pitching almost always beats hitting. Especially if the hitting is as off-and-on as the Cubs' has been this mini-season.

And yet ...

And yet, because it's the Cubs, it's hard not to believe the ghost of an unraveling Mark Prior was somewhere close in that mausoleum of a ballpark. And that somewhere a spectral Alex Gonzalez kept booting that double-play ball over and over again. And that, in the outfield, there was a whiff of old anger as Bartman reached and Moises Alou went ballistic.

What's that you say?

Well, yes, of course that's silly.

Maybe.