Two hours of sleep—one hour for each of the previous night’s games—and it was time to wake up and do something. Anything. Terry Francona couldn’t sit still, even if he had told himself that he would. His two youngest daughters, Leah and Jamie, were downstairs. For them and everyone else in the Franconas’ Chestnut Hill house, it was a lovely Saturday morning, August 19, 2006. For him, who knows, it could have still been Friday night at Fenway. He could have been in the seventh inning of either loss to the Yankees, sweating and rocking in his dugout seat. His nerves were jumping again, as they had before the five-game series started, because he knew it was a bad time for the Yankees to be in town. The teams were separated by two games in the American League East standings when the series began, and two games in, the Red Sox were already slipping. It’s the strangest thing: you can go outside the morning after a game against the Yankees and feel what happened the night before. It’s as if all of Boston is a weathervane, pointing in the general direction of the Red Sox.
