Fire Gardy

This is the end Beautiful friend This is the end My only friend, the end It hurts to set you free But you’ll never follow me The end of laughter and soft lies The end of nights we tried to die – The Doors

Well folks, that’s it. The dream is dead, the season is over, this is the end. We’ve finally successfully given the division away, proving that we did indeed want it less.

Mauer finished his season 0-3, stumbling to the batting title as embarrassingly as possible. Morneau finished in a 10-59 slump, sacrificing the MVP trophy to the hated Red Sox. The rest of the cast of characters … just as bad, just more anonymous.

The only thing good about this game was that Blackburn looked great, holding the White Sox to one run in 6.1 innings, and that one run game on a 10,000 foot home run by Jim Thome in the seventh inning. He looked great. This game was not Blackburn’s fault. And I’m absolutely not confident we would have done anything better if this game were at the dome. We just didn’t hit. We didn’t show up.

Visions of warm champagne were filling our heads as we flailed at pitches and choked as hard as we know how.

But now that the season is over, we can finally consider the fact that this is better than anyone (other than myself — my World Series prediction died hard tonight) thought this season would be. This was supposed to be a rebuilding year. Cuddyer’s t-shirts with “162+” on them were thought to be a joke to get the guys to play hard in a down year — but who could have known just how cruel that message would be in the end?

It’s too soon to look forward to next season; instead, it’s the right time to sit back and reflect on the good times. It doesn’t seem like it now, but there were plenty. Seriously. Close your eyes.

Gomez hit for the cycle.

Mauer won a batting title.

Morneau finished 1 RBI behind Hamilton for the AL title.

Morneau won the home run derby over the very same Hamilton.

Slowey threw two shutouts.

Liriano appeared to get his stuff back.

Jose Mijares emerged as a future setup man.

Baker can handle pressure.

Keep thinking. It was a good season. We could have won another game or two here or there and got into the playoffs, but so could the White Sox — let’s not play that game. It’s a loser’s game.

But this is the end of laughter. This is the end of the last night when our dreams died.