BOSTON – A lighted, 17-stories-high “Go Sox” message that has been displayed on the side of the Prudential Tower during the Major League playoffs isn’t something you create on a whim.

Building staff have spent 300 man-hours arranging lights and window shades each time the message has been displayed during the Red Sox’ playoff run, said Amy Daniels, marketing director for Boston Properties, which owns and manages the 52-story tower.

It all seems worthwhile after the work is done.

“It’s nice hearing the reaction as people walk by and see it,” Daniels said. “People take pictures of it with their cameras and their cell-phones.”

The message appeared on the west side of the tower facing Fenway Park each home game night during the American League Championship Series. It also has appeared for the first two games of the World Series and will resume if the series returns to Boston, Daniels said.

To create the message, shades are pulled down on 931 windows in strategic locations on the building’s west side. Shades also are pulled on the north side to prevent outside light from filtering in. Portable fluorescent lights are put in place next to windows to spell out the message across 169 windows between the 32nd and 49th floors. The message is 175 feet wide, with “Go” taking up eight vertical stories and “Sox” taking up nine stories.

Pilgrims are Sox fans, too

PLYMOUTH, Mass. – The re-enactors portraying pilgrims at the Plimoth Plantation normally are careful to stay in character and not step out of the 17th Century.

But lately, the re-enactors have taken to wearing the namesake apparel of their favorite team.

Professionals portraying colonists who arrived on the Mayflower began wearing red wool stockings daily two weeks ago. According to a Plimoth Plantation news release, the red socks represent the re-enactors’ “simple, yet silent way of saying, We believe!”‘

“We believe, just as the Pilgrims believed some things are predestined: This is the year for a Rex Sox World Series championship,” said John Kemp, the plantation’s associate director of colonial interpretation.

The re-enactors “have vowed to continue as silent, yet strong supporters of the Red Sox Nation to the very end,” the plantation said – even though the site’s Pilgrim Village is set more than 268 years before Babe Ruth was born, and the only curse colonists knew about then was the occasional story of witchcraft.