Rain fell in the tenth inning. The baseball, slick from the drizzle, came off the bat of Cleveland's Michael Martinez. It bounced toward Kris Bryant. He smiled as he fielded it, set his feet, and made a throw across the diamond. Anthony Rizzo caught it, put the ball in his back pocket, and the Chicago Cubs poured onto the Progressive Field infield. They had won 8-7. The final out was a routine ground ball, a mundane end to a century of theatrical failure.
The victory concluded the longest championship drought in North American professional sports. The Cubs last won the World Series in 1908. The intervening decades built a mythology of curses, from a billy goat to a black cat to a fan's interfered-with foul ball. The weight of that history defined every pitch of the series, particularly after the Cubs blew a three-games-to-one lead. Game 7 itself featured a three-run Cubs lead evaporating, a Rajai Davis home run tying the game in the eighth, and a 17-minute rain delay before the tenth.
Its significance was not about breaking a curse but about severing a civic identity tied to loss. For generations, being a Cubs fan meant embracing futility. The win redefined the franchise from lovable losers to a modern baseball operation. It also delivered a profound, almost disorienting relief to a massive fanbase.
The impact is statistical. The 108-year drought is a record that will likely stand unchallenged. The game itself, a chaotic masterpiece of momentum swings, instantly entered baseball lore. For the Cubs, it was a liberation. For everyone else, it provided a definitive answer to a perennial question of when.