IT WOULD BE an exaggeration, but not much of one, to say I moved to Boston so I could start rooting for the home team.

My parents both grew up in Massachusetts, and we moved around when I was a kid — not a lot, not so much I started thinking of myself as a rootless citizen of the world, but just enough that I never developed a buffer against an implicit sense of being away from home. None of the places we lived was a place I felt I was from. Lima, Peru: well, obviously I wasn’t Peruvian. Princeton, New Jersey: I’d have loved to claim it as my native soil, but we moved away just when I was starting to put down roots. Suburban Washington, DC: a bland land where everyone came from somewhere else anyway. I suffered from what my brother now calls " place envy. " I never knew what to say if people asked my home town.

But there was never any question about my baseball team. By the time my father plunked my nine-year-old self down in front of the television in October 1975 (after months of priming my interest by pretending that Fred Lynn’s name was " Fred Linda " ), I was so hooked I begged for multiple extensions of bedtime — and staged a World Series–long feud when my best friend cast her loyalty with Cincinnati, where her grandparents lived. (Issue-to-work-out-in-therapy note: I did not see Carlton Fisk’s home run in Game Six. When Bernie Carbo came up to the plate as a pinch hitter with the Sox down 6-3 in the eighth, my mother said, " It’s over. I can’t believe you’ve ever even heard of this guy. You’ve got to go to bed. " )

I did see Pudge in person, though — at Yankee Stadium. I saw Lynn and Yaz and Jim Rice and Dewey Evans there, too. A few years later I saw Wade Boggs and Jerry Remy and Yaz (still hanging in there) at the Orioles’ old Memorial Stadium, where for reasons that remain mysterious to me they played John Denver’s " Thank God I’m a Country Boy " instead of " Take Me Out to the Ball Game " during seventh-inning stretch. (Just as well; I was probably in my teens before it dawned on me that the latter song does not actually contain the lyrics " Root, root, root for the Red Sox. " ) I saw games at Fenway too, of course; in deference to my father’s homing instincts, we always spent part of the summer on the Cape no matter where we lived, so I knew what it was like to line up along Brookline Avenue for $3 bleacher seats in the hot sun. But it was an exotic novelty to cheer when the rest of the crowd cheered. We were used to being on the wrong side, a family tribe of misfits who risked pelting with taunts and peanuts.

BY THE time I graduated from college, I’d had enough of belonging to a tribe: I wanted to be a citizen. With no job, grad-school plans, or functional romantic scenario, I could have gone anywhere. But where I really wanted to be was home — wherever that was. Other than the jobless college town I was living in, only one place came to mind. I knew that if I moved here I wouldn’t have the right accent — even my parents had shed theirs before I was born. But at least I’d have the right memories: leaping out of bed every morning to check the standings during the summer of ’78, emerging from Rosh Hashanah services to hear the awful words ÒBucky Dent.Ó It felt right. I got on a plane.

When I first came to Boston, in the fall of 1987, Red Sox Nation was still trying to recover from the sight of that ground ball shooting between Bill Buckner’s legs the year before. Some people tell me they never really recovered their enthusiasm after ’86, that the build-up and disappointment burned them out for good. But for me, it was never as much about winning as it was about allegiance and ritual. The Sox might lose, but they’d lose with a relatively stable cast of familiar characters, not just a bunch of hired guns. They’d lose according to a script as intimately and agonizingly well-established as the promises of an unreliable lover. And they’d lose at Fenway Park, where my brother saw Carl Yastrzemski’s final game, where my father saw Ted Williams’s last home run, where my great-grandfather, Max Wyzanski, attended opening day almost every year for half a century.

My ardor for the home team has cooled somewhat since I became a Bostonian, as one player after another has left (sometimes bitterly) and practically the entire town has swallowed the idea that Fenway is too battered and old-fashioned to survive. It isn’t really about allegiance for anyone but me, as I realized yet again when I saw Roger Clemens in Yankee pinstripes a few weeks ago on the cover of the New York Times Magazine — next to David Cone in a Red Sox uniform, no less. Clemens may be a big dumb oaf, but he was our big dumb oaf, and it still feels wrong that he’s gone. After Dan Duquette let Mo Vaughn walk away with his big, raw feelings all hurt, I actually tried to take a year off.

But for at least as long as Fenway remains standing, the bond will never really be broken. These days, both my apartment and my office are just blocks away from the old park; with my bedroom window open on a summer day, I can hear the starting line-up being read, and follow the action by listening to the cheers even when I don’t have the game on the radio. Unlike my great-grandfather, I’ve never made it to opening day, but last year a couple of co-workers and I circled the park for about half an hour before the first pitch, mingling with the crowd and biting into the first (admittedly, disgusting) hot dogs of the season. This year, as usual, I’ll pass the crowd in front of the ticket office on my way to work; maybe I’ll finally get in line, maybe I won’t. But no matter where I am when they shout " Play ball! " , I’ll be home.

Linda Lowenthal can be reached at llowenthal[a]phx.com.

Issue Date: April 5-12, 2001