Voices: Can Cubs fans adjust to misery-free baseball?

CHICAGO — My wife jokingly asked my 5-year-old daughter, as we tucked into our breakfast on Sunday, which section of the paper she thought I would reach for first.

Of course, I grabbed the sports section before my little girl could answer.

If you’re a Chicagoan and even a passing baseball fan, this current moment feels like a dream that you never want to awaken from. And any distractions from Chicago's difficult reality these days are welcome.

The city recorded at least eight homicides on Mother’s Day weekend and is on pace to tally more than 500 for the year. Chicago is mired in a fiscal debacle as a result of a $20 billion underfunded public worker pension plan.The police department is in the midst of a Justice Department civil rights investigation.

Baseball feels like a salve in a city where too much is going wrong.

Fans of the White Sox have watched their team sprint out of the gate to the best record in the American League. The Sox have been mostly mediocre for the last decade, but at least they broke an 88-year-old malaise in 2005 when they won the World Series.

Most of the attention is on my team, the Chicago Cubs, who are off to the team’s best start since 1907 and the best start for any National League team since the 1977 Los Angeles Dodgers.

For Cubs fans, who have suffered through the most inglorious championship drought in American sports — the last World Series title was in 1908 and the last World Series appearance in 1945 — the joy of the moment is tempered by a lifetime of disappointment.

The well-worn legend is that Billy Sianis, owner of the famed Billy Goat Tavern, put a curse on the franchise after then-owner P.K. Wrigley refused to allow his goat in the ballpark during Game 4 of the 1945 World Series. The Cubs were up two games to one on the Detroit Tigers, but would lose the next three and never appear in another Series.

It’s difficult not to be affected by at least a measure of frustration and pessimism from a cursed team that has offered its faithful little to cheer about over the last century.

My misery started as a 7-year-old who watched the Cubs blow a two games to none series lead to the San Diego Padres in the 1984 National League Championship Series.

As a 20-something, I was at Wrigley Field to watch the Cubs come within five outs of clinching a National League pennant before collapsing in what is often referred to as the “Bartman game,” named for the Cubs fan who got in the way of Moises Alou as he tried to reach into the stands to catch a fly ball. (For the record, the collapse was not Bartman’s fault.)

The 1984 and 2003 collapses, along with last year’s unexpected playoff run after five straight years in the division cellar, were the best years of my own personal painful fandom.

Cubs fans have been fairly mocked for our faithfulness and consistent “Wait till next year” optimism. For most of my life, the Cubs ownership has gotten away with putting subpar teams on the field, knowing they can fill Wrigley, an intimate old ballpark where bad baseball has never interfered with the well-cultivated party atmosphere.

Tom Ricketts, whose family bought the team after the 2009 reason, snagged executive Theo Epstein from the once long-suffering Boston Red Sox. They spent the next five years tearing down and rebuilding a roster focused on talented young position players.They bolstered their young core with big free agent acquisitions and got lucky with a trade for a once struggling Jake Arrieta, who is in the midst of one of the most dominating stretches by a pitcher in baseball history.

So, yes this time it does feel different, but it’s hard not to be guarded.

Over the weekend, my daughter and I stopped by a fancy cheese shop to pick up some treats for Mother’s Day.

The cheesemonger spotted my daughter’s Cubs sweatshirt and excitedly told us he was planning to take his 1-year-old child to her first game during the current homestand.

He also confided that he was doing his part to try to break the curse: Last time he was at the park, he threw some goat salumi on the field.

Strange, sure, but well worth a try.

Madhani is Paste BN's Chicago correspondent. Follow him on Twitter: @AamerISmad