As a lifelong Boston Red Sox sufferer, uh, sympathizer, there are five games that left a lifelong impression. Long after time swipes from me the ability to remember what I ate for breakfast on a given day, I will recall precisely where I was when those historic events unfolded.

Because I am a Sox fan, three of those memories are lousy ones. A fourth, bittersweet.

The fifth? A thing of beauty.

Don’t ask me to unearth many details about kindergarten, but I distinctly recall leaping from the school bus and dashing up the front stairs just in time to watch Bucky Bleedin’ Dent launch one to the Citgo sign in October 1978. The hurt didn’t run too deeply yet; I probably rushed off just as quickly to count my baseball cards.

Less than five years later, we were at a neighbor’s house for an Independence Day lobster bake. Not only was I deathly allergic to shellfish (still am), but I beheld the gruesome sight of Dave Righetti no-hitting a Sox lineup that featured Wade Boggs, Jim Rice, Tony Armas, Dwight Evans and Carl Yastrzemski, among others.

At the end of the eighth inning, as Ned Martin and Bob Montgomery cut away to a commercial, the zero in the Red Sox hit column on the screen was blinking. One of my fellow couch potatoes muttered, “That’s because they don’t think he can do it.”

Well, he did. That one hurt a little bit more. I longed for the days of Legos and stale, rectangular slices of Topps bubble gum, when things didn’t matter as much.

Fast forward to 1986, which offered my racing, adolescent mind two baseball-related distractions. One cable-free April night in my corner of a house on a dirt road, I wore out the dial on my Walkman radio as the Celtics completed a playoff victory while a potential-laden Texan named Roger Clemens struck out 20 Seattle Mariners.

Little did I know that the Celtics essentially would reek for the next decade-and-a-half and that Clemens would complete his march to Cooperstown in pinstripes.

Much sooner – almost six months to the day, in fact -I’d get to watch a start by Clemens that would leave a less pleasant permanent deposit in the memory bank.

A few minutes after midnight as Saturday night faded into Sunday morning, I found myself on my knees in the livingroom, one step between silent prayer and preparing to assault our 27-inch color set with a wiffle bat after the Sox coughed up what would have been their first world championship in 68 years.

That count is up to 85 and rising. Thank you, Calvin Schiraldi, Bob Stanley, Rich Gedman and Bill Buckner.

For one Friday afternoon, however, all was forgotten. Thank you, Jason Varitek, David Ortiz, Bill Mueller and Manny Ramirez.

Thirty years into this dysfunctional marriage that has offered me little more than frustration, there were fireworks.

Twenty years to the day that the lean, mean Righetti silenced the Olde Towne Team in Yankee Stadium, the men in gray stared down another left-hander, the morbidly unathletic David Wells, and transformed the House That Ruth Built into their personal batting cage.

Another lobster bake. Another house full of out-of-town relatives who know the Red Sox as nothing more than a monument to underachieving and late-season collapses.

Instant vindication.

No, there weren’t any championship rings awarded. Mike Torrez didn’t take over from Derek Lowe in the seventh inning and make things right.

When the sun rose Saturday morning, the Sox still trailed the Yankees by three games in the American League East and still had to trot out Ramiro Mendoza (like Torrez before him, undoubtedly an infiltration tactic by the enemy) against none other than Clemens in their bid for an encore. As it turned out, that endeavor didn’t go badly, either.

The championship scoreboard since the liquidation of Babe Ruth still stands at two baker’s dozen to zip. Before the Fourth of July 2003, however, the Yankees never experienced the indignity of watching the opposing team go deep seven times on their hallowed home turf.

And now they have.

Small potatoes? Absolutely.

Little more than a moral victory, you say? Fair enough.

For whatever reason, I abandoned my recent practice of refusing to watch a baseball game in its entirety that I wasn’t being paid to watch.

Talk about good timing.

It was a mighty display on a mightily historic day.

Baseball is a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately endeavor. Ask none other than Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, a guy who never met a manager he liked enough not to fire.

Keep your rings, George. Enjoy your perch atop the standings.

No matter what else transpires this weekend, those who live and die with the Sox have been resuscitated by a visit from a long-lost friend.

Temporary bragging rights.

Kalle Oakes is sports editor. He can be reached by e-mail at koakes@sunjournal.com.

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