BOSTON — If Norm had sat down at the end of the bar to watch the Red Sox-Rays game Saturday night, he would have declared: “Beer, please. Stop me after one . . . maybe after 1:30.”
Rather, Fred from Back Bay was sitting at the end of the bar, enjoying a Samuel Adams Oktoberfest, potato skins and the Red Sox’s 2-1 lead.
“We got the ol’ mojo now,” said Fred, tapping his fingers on the wood and pointing at an empty glass. “Another SamAm here, for luck.”
When Jason Varitek crushed a home run in the sixth inning to push the Red Sox out by one run again in the sixth game of the American League Championship Series, the place went knuckle-bumping, high- fiving, glass-breaking rowdy and feral.
This is the most famous fictional/ factual bar in America.
It’s been 15 years since the beloved, TV comedy “Cheers” went off the air, but the walk-down world of Norm, Cliff, Frasier, Carla, Woody (what a great name for a bartender) and Sam, the former Boston reliever, still exists in reality — and in Red Sox Nation.
Where everybody knows your name.
“Cheers” might have been as dead as everyone in “The Departed” on Saturday night, except the Sox were playing on.
“Place is packed. The Sox is alive. The town is alive. More games at the Pahk. Be World Champs again,” says Billy DeCain, a lifelong Bostonian who says Fenway “Pahk” instead of “Park” and never says die. He’s the manager at Cheers and has been working here for 21 years, since he was in engineering school and about the time that the TV show turned a neighborhood bar called “Bull & Finch Pub” into a national monument as famous as the obelisk on Bunker Hill.
“It looked bleak on Thursday night, but these are the Sox, and you can’t count us out,” said DeCain, sounding like U.S. revolutionary Gen. Israel Putnam at Bunker Hill in ’75 — 1775.
At 8 p.m. (Eastern), there was no room at the bar for Norm, Cliff or a barfly named Woody. But the crowd was displeased. The start of the game was not being telecast because of “technical difficulties” on TBS.
“(Fix) your technical difficulties,” Fred yelled at the TV, and the framed photo of Ted Williams on the wall shook.
When his next SamAm and the picture on the television appeared, the game was tied at 1. Or 1:30.
On Thursday night, when the Red Sox trailed the Rays 7-0 in the seventh, a man driving home and listening on the radio banged his head on the steering wheel over and over. In the ninth his head hurt, but he was brain-happy — 8-7 Sox.
The Red Sox, who didn’t do anything unbelievable for so long, had done something inconceivable again — come back in a series.
And, on Saturday night, they were down 1-0, then took a 2-1 lead, then a 4-2 lead.
“In Game 5, the people gave up and went home. Nobody’s going home tonight,” said Josh, a Cheers waiter. They’ll soak their delight or drown their sorrow.
Norm would have been pessimistic. “It’s a dog-eat-dog world, and I’m wearing Milkbone underwear,” he once remarked in the series.
Fred at the end of the bar was more optimistic. “Sox will win. I can feel a seventh game.” With all the beers he had inhaled, it didn’t seem as if Fred could feel anything.
The mighty Patriots lost the Super Bowl and have lost Tom Brady, and the Celtics won the NBA championship, and the Bruins are, well, the Bruins, but this truly is a Red Sox town, and the other sports are mere offseason diversions. Manny is a turncoat, a traitor, but Big Papi always will be a loyalist, and comes up with another Big Hit.
Justin “Arm” Masterson is pitching for the Red Sox in the bottom of the eighth, and “Cheers” is lurching when the leadoff batter walks, and the count goes to 2-0 on the next hitter. The door opens, and a chill rushes in. Has Frasier’s wife Lilith just arrived?
“Give me an out and another SamAm,” Fred says.
Immediately, he gets both, and the Red Sox are an inning away from Game 7.
After the eighth, TBS promoted its telecast of the series in high definition. Bad timing. The Cheers crowd booed.
Closer Jonathan “Livingston” Papelbon is on the mound.
“Hey, you from Colorado,” said a fellow in a gray Red Sox sweat shirt. “About to do to these what we did to yours.”
“One more SamAm,” Fred said. One more game.
Oooxxx’s, Sox.
Cheers.
Woody Paige: 303-954-1095 or wpaige@denverpost.com
