We'll close out the year with this thought from the late Bart Giamatti, courtesy of my Collegian pal-turned-Facebook friend Pat Johnson: It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today, October 2, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone.

"The Green Fields of the Mind"

from "A Great and Glorious Game: Baseball Writings of A. Bartlett Giamatti, et. al

This thought is not entirely applicable if you happen to live in the subtropics, where as I was listening to the Red Sox season coming to its heartbreaking end it was in the low 90s and sunny as all hell. But it captures the mood.

Oct. 12: OK this really is the last Sox quote of the year but I just had to add this line from today's Globe, from the great Dan Shaughnessy:

All you young New Englanders who shrugged whenever dad said, “The Sox will blow it, they always choke at the end,’’ . . . now you know.