We all know the story: greatest comeback in sports history leads to the biggest sports championship of all time.  Curt Schilling's bloody sock. David Ortiz's game-winning hits, Dave Roberts' Game 4 steal, Keith Foulke's invincibility, Johnny Damon's haircut... it was larger than life.

But we all know this.  The best sports journalists of our time have covered this story again and again, in newspapers and magazines, books and DVD's, web sites and TV specials.  But true Red Sox love begins and ends with the fans.  I don't pretend to be more knowledgeable or a bigger fan than anyone else.  I'm just more thorough in keeping what I write. 

I also happened to be a diehard Sox fan who felt like the world actually changed as the postseason unfolded.  I felt like this was The Year, but I also felt like last year was The Year.  I was obsessed, even went to Game 1 in Anaheim.  But as tends to happen with history, I didn't know I was in the midst of something amazing until it was underway.   So I wrote a bit in the beginning, then when things got more serious, so did my writing.

In these pages, I've compiled all my Red Sox-related blog entries for October, 2004.  It wasn't so hard to find them -- by the middle of the ALCS, I could think of nothing else.  I've also included some selected emails, although I don't have a ton because I was doing a lot more of screaming into telephones then.  But they add another dimension to the proceedings, both supplementing and foreshadowing what was in the blog.  Also, you can see me using the same jokes multiple times, which cracks me up. 

Telling the story of the 2004 Red Sox is hard.  The NESN DVD didn't quite get it, and neither did the Stephen King book or the MLB DVD.  (I haven't read Shaughnessy's book, but I bet my life it's pure crapola.)  Nobody's quite captured what happened last October, and maybe nobody ever will.  What follows is not an attempt at an overarching look, but merely to add one more piece of the puzzle -- my piece.

If you'd like to collect your Sox-related blog entries and/or emails from last October, let me know.  I'd love to expand this into a larger project, and I'd be happy to host the pages here.  Otherwise, take a look through the good times of last year, as well as the bad times that made them seem so good.

-Dan Tobin, 8/05