The Dismantling of the Dream Team

Saying goodbye to my all-time favorite Chicago Cubs squad

It was the spring of 2015, and I was sitting on my couch. That’s honestly where I had spent most of 2015, as an otherwise healthy 32-year-old deep in the throes of the battle for my life against Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.

The daily fight was the struggle to stave off the symptoms of my bi-weekly chemotherapy infusions. Chemo and I would face off for 12 rounds, and my doctors and I were always confident that I would be victorious — a nice luxury when you’re facing cancer and chemo, but not one that saves you any effort on the way to the finish line.

As the wintry Chicago air developed that sweet-smelling hint of spring freshness on random days in March — when you smell it, you know it — I turned my chemo-addled brain back to a lifelong obsession that had somewhat waned in recent years: Chicago Cubs Baseball.

I don’t like to say it out loud, but even having cut my Cubs fan teeth on the win-challenged teams of the early-to-mid 1990s, I had grown stagnant in my fandom. The team was going somewhere, someday, but I had been badly burned by 2003, 2007 and 2008, and my life was too full of other things to follow the daily adventures of a team with no promise.

I was still a Cubs fan, but we were on a break. I watched them from afar — going to a couple of games a year and making the requisite jokes that I didn’t even know who was on the team anymore, and that it wasn’t…