A disappointing season is easy enough to explain. A bad decade is harder. Let the waiting stretch across generations, though, and sports fans will start looking beyond trades, injuries, and coaching decisions for an answer. That is how curses become part of the conversation. They grow out of real moments that people never quite forget: a superstar being sent away, a goat removed from a ballpark, a statue thrown into a river, an old building tradition being broken. Before long, the original event and everything that happened afterward become tangled together. For fans who grew up following teams on the radio, reading box scores in the morning paper or watching weekend games with the family, many of these stories are as familiar as the players themselves. The supernatural explanations may be questionable, but the frustration behind them was very real.
#1: The Curse of the Bambino
October 2004 is probably the best place to begin, because Boston fans had waited 86 years for that month. After completing an extraordinary comeback against the Yankees in the American League Championship Series, the Red Sox swept St. Louis and finally won the World Series. Only then could people look back at the transaction that had haunted the franchise for generations.
