Editorial Observer: The Hat With the ‘B’

On the Q train Wednesday morning, I was sandwiched between two men in Red Sox caps, with Game 6 of the World Series just hours off. All the way to Times Square, the men stood unmolested, even unnoticed.

How things have changed. Ten years ago, wearing that navy-blue hat with the raised red "B" in the heart of enemy territory was an invitation to potential mayhem.

I wore mine in the bleachers at Yankee Stadium once, in 2003. Never again, I said. First, it was just peanuts fired at the back of my head, which I endured as only a skinny kid with no meaningful reinforcements would.

Then Shea Hillenbrand hit a home run to left in the eighth. I turned to my assaulters, smiled and tipped my cap — an ill-advised gesture that provoked a degree of vitriol and threats of imminent and specific bodily harm that I had, to that point, seen only in movies.

So what if it was liquid courage at $7 a pint? It was a different time. My mother called every day to make sure I was alive.

That October, after Grady Little overcooked Pedro and then Aaron Boone, and you know the rest, I wore the hat as I stalked home grimly through the gauntlet of bars on Bleecker Street. Yankee fans tumbled out on both sides, taunting and threatening me. The world still made sense to them then.

They were winners, and the Red Sox were still part of an unbroken line of losers. It was in the natural order of things.

One year later, that world turned upside down. No four days will ever mean as much to Boston sports fans as Oct. 17, 18, 19, and 20, 2004. In an instant, the hat was transformed from a target into Kryptonite. For weeks I wore it wherever I went, fully aware of the silent rage it evoked in people walking by.

The best part was the mutual understanding: We both knew that nothing they could say could hurt me anymore. I was trespassing on the lawn of a great mansion, and no one could kick me off. "19-18! 19-18!" was a children's song from a forgotten land.

The only person to say anything was a cop, and only then from the safety of his cruiser's megaphone. "Red Sox suck," he officially reminded me. Never has a man with a Glock on his belt seemed so harmless.

Now, 2013. I have the same hat, but when I wear it outside these days, I get nothing, just like the men on the subway: no glares, no swears, no peanuts.

I see the red "B" everywhere, in fact, as though over the past decade we've slowly crept out of hiding. Maybe it's all the non-natives who continue to roll into town. Or maybe it's 12 years — soon, no doubt, to be at least 16 — of a Red Sox fan running City Hall. Or maybe it's just that we win.

New York doesn't accept us, but it tolerates us. Like so many of the city's daily nuisances, we've been absorbed.

This might seem preferable to the regular threat of violence, but if I wanted to live where everyone agreed with me I'd go back to Boston.

Perhaps it's folly to say, but a part of me misses the old days.

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