Cub fans are born, not made. It just takes a little bit to realize you are one.

My father loves to tell the story: I was ensconced in my seat at Wrigley, paging through comic books. It was not yet 1969, and 1945 was still not impossibly far away. Cub legends like Ernie Banks, Billy Williams and Ron Santo strode the field. Dad was watching the game, wishing his son was more of a baseball fan. An older Italian gentlemen, observing all this, leaned over and asked, “Whatsa matter, little boy? Don’t you like-a da baseball?”

In the bottom of the ninth, Ernie Banks hit a walk-off home run. As of that magical moment, and ever since, I DO like-a da baseball. And I love-a my Cubs. Like my father before me and his father before him.

I never met my grandfather, who died a few years after the Cubs lost the ’45 series. He was a plumber throughout the Depression in Chicago although, at one point, he had bigger dreams. A talented semi-pro catcher, he was scouted by the Yankees and invited to a try-out. His mother convinced him playing a child’s game was no way to make a living. If he had become a Yankee… I can’t even complete the thought, nor contemplate the disastrous chain of events which would have then ensued.

But he stayed, and struggled, and provided, and root, root, rooted for the Cubs, and had a couple of sons, both of whom are still alive. He died when Dad was 19, at Mass, in the arms of a priest. Sure, he went straight to Heaven.

And last night, he sent some Heaven back down on his namesakes, three additional generations’ worth.

My father was born in the Depression, and was a talented athlete in his own right, although golf was his game. Still is. In his childhood, the Cubs were in the middle of a string of triennial World Series appearances – ’29, ’32, ’35, ’38 – all of which were, obviously, lost. But the clock-like regularity of Cub National League dominance, briefly regained in 1945, belied the decades of absolute futility that were to follow.

Via Catholic Charities, I was adopted into that futility in 1962. Despite my South Side Sox Fan Mom (whose family is the template for the Hachecristo clan) it was inevitable that I become a Cub fan – I was even born on the North Side. Until that magical Ernie Banks home run, though, I hadn’t realized it. Little did I know the great joy and great pain that would follow.

Little, too, did I know that my family fandom of futility was part of a much bigger family. Years and years and years and years of loving a sports team despite their failures has created a much larger family of millions, across the country and across the globe, whose shared last name is “Cubs Fan.”   Yesterday, in the middle of a Kroger in the middle of Ohio, I shared a fist-bump with another brother in a Cubs tee shirt.

Yesterday, too, I called my Dad back in the Chicago ‘burbs, still in the same house I grew up in. Yes, it was Game 7, but I would have called anyway, given the significance of the date: November 2.

You see, the Cubs won their World Series on my Dad’s 86^th birthday.

We did it, Ernie. We made it, Dad.

“There are 108 stitches in a baseball. There are 108 beads on the Catholic Rosary.” (Bull Durham)  There are 108 years in a Cubs drought.  And not one more.

Happy Birthday, Dad. Many happy returns.  From the entire Cubs family.  And your son.