Way back in 2011, I compiled a list of the Twelve Life Lessons Learned From Being a Red Sox Fan. Here it is:

1. Winning doesn’t build character. Losing builds character.

2. One of life’s most important skills is the ability to get beaten, humiliated and embarrassed and still return to the field and try again.

3. Everyone can make a difference, and you never know when you will be the one.

4. Be ready for that moment when it comes, and don’t be afraid.

5. The modestly gifted can and often do exceed the performance of the true stars, because they know they have to work harder, and do.

6. A courageous and noble defeat is as admirable as a victory, and sometimes more so.

7. Beware of stars who break the rules, and beware the manager who lets them do it.

8. Victory is never assured, and defeat is never certain. Never give up.

9. Accept that luck will play a big role in your life, but never use it as an excuse or an alibi.

10. You can try your hardest, make perfect plans, execute superbly, and still fall flat on your face.

11. Winning fairly and playing by the rules is more important than winning.

12. Anything can happen.

Most of all, I think, baseball has taught me what Roger Angell described most eloquently in his 1975 essay “Agincourt and After,” about the ’75 World Series and Carlton Fisk’s iconic home run. Baseball helps keep me ethical by preserving my ability to give a damn. In the end, the most important of the virtues, the one that makes all the others work and matter, is caring, one of the Six Pillars of Character. He wrote,

“It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look—I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring—caring deeply and passionately, really caring—which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté—the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball—seems a small price to pay for such a gift.”

I should end this post after quoting a far better writer than I, but I have one last note. That raucous song above was the anthem of the Red Sox in 2004, when the team finally won the World Series after a horrible series of near misses and late season catastrophes since 1918. But like so much in baseball, the song has historical relevance too.

The original song “Tessie” was featured in the 1902 Broadway musical, “The Silver Slipper.” In 1903 there was a boisterous club of Boston baseball fans called the Royal Rooters organized in the Third Base Saloon, owned by Royal Rooters leader, Michael “Nuff Ced” McGreevy. (“Honey” Fitzgerald, Mayor of Boston and a scion of the Kennedy family to come, was also a Royal Rooter.”)When the Boston Americans faced the Pittsburgh Pirates in the first World Series ever that year, McGreevy plotted to taunt the opposing team. McGreevy changed the lyrics of “Tessie” so it was full of insults, particular insults to the Pirates star shortstop Honus Wagner. The song, angry Pittsburgh players said later, drove them to distraction, and the Boston Americans won the first World Series in history, five games to three in a nine-game series.

The anniversary of that first Series win along with a strong Red Sox team many felt would win the American League pennant moved the club to revive “Tessie”in 2004. That required some updating, but the Irish local band the team approached, The Dropkick Murphys, took on the challenge. They decided to use some of the original verses while re-telling the story of McGreevy and the Royal Rooters.

The first time the song was performed at Fenway Park was in July of 2004, and that game featured a fight with the Yankees and a thrilling Red Sox comeback. It became the anthem of the entire season.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Play ball!