Sitting in a deer blind, after having slept (a little) on this one. And it’s just damned sweet. The Astros were my first sport love, going to games with my grandpa when he’d come up to visit. When he had a stroke and was bedridden in ass-nowhere Mexico, we’d go down to visit, and I’d bring a stack of newspaper articles and other materials about the stros of that era - Cruz, Ashby, Cabell - he’d listen, clutch my hand, and sometimes laugh, sometimes cry. In high school, I went to dozens of games a year in the $3 bleacher seats, including that great season in 86. I was at a college fair, listening on the radio, when they lost to the Mets in game 6. I married a Houston girl. She’d grown up a Stros fan too. So that’s how we raised our kids, including a boy who ended up being a pretty damn good high school CF. Fandom in his youth was hard; the Rangers were good, and popular among his peers. The Astros weren’t. But I explained that we were an Astros family, and he got it. He’d come up in the morning and look at the sports page, and even as a kid, mutter “dammit…the Astros lost.” Then we got to watch the rise. We watched 2017’s game 5 together, a collection of anxiety, pacing the room. We watched the final out of game 7, tears in our eyes. Later, we got tickets for the ALCS, and watched his favorite player, Altuve, hit a walkoff HR. Drove back to Austin that night, listening to the radio replay over and over. This year, he was moving away from home to start college. He wanted an Astros jersey before he left. They were hard to find, but he finally found one, with the name of an exciting rookie, Pena. He grabbed it. Now in school in Scotland, he figured out how to stream the games to the tv in the dorm rec room. He’s turned a bunch of Scots onto baseball, and made them Astros fans. They watch games that go till 4:00 am their time, wearing his extra Astros gear. Last night, we got on a video call for the last inning. Oddly enough, his stream was a few seconds ahead of ours (out at a ranch, through Starlink). I knew we’d won before I saw it on our tv screen. I saw my son’s face, and I knew. That’s a fantastic way to win a WS.