Point of View: I Can’t Watch, I Must Watch

When the Republican  candidates began to talk the other night about sending in the Sixth Fleet, strangling Putin, strong-arming China, and bringing Mexico’s bordercrossing legions to heel, I walked down the hall to see on our other TV the Pirates-Cubs game, which was such a nail-biter that, inspired by the debaters, I prayed Zeus would hurl a thunderbolt at Jake Arrieta. “I’ve got to stop this — it’s a terrible addiction,” I said to Mary the next morning. “No, it’s not drinking, it’s the staying up to all hours watching the Pirates play. They loaded the bases in the eighth, there was one out, and then...Idon’tknow . . . everything unraveled . . . arrrggghh.”

She wasn’t hearing any of it. How could she, tending as she was her hair with a dryer shaped like one of those creatures from the Burgess Shale.

Joe Zucker, a lifelong Cubs fan, thinks it will come down to a onegame wild card play-in at Wrigley. Neither of us — the Pirates always lost when I was growing up in Pittsburgh, and the Cubs never won, but who cared — is used to this Empyrean sphere, one in which Yankee fans have lolled about for years.

“What will be will be,” I say to myself. Though I can’t let it be.

Someone will save us, McCutchen perhaps, it is usually he, or Kang, or Polanco, or Marte, or even Sean Rodriguez (who looks more like a pirate than anyone). I can’t watch, I must watch.

It’s the same with the Steelers. And the other night they were both playing at the same time, which meant I was running up and down the hall, from one TV to the other, only to be doubly eviscerated at the end. I left Pittsburgh so long ago, but it — whatever that is, the trees, the buckeyes, the stogies, plaid-lined jeans, the Red American Flyer, Isaly’s iconic conical ice cream scoops, pistachio being my favorite, and the cigar smoke that wreathed Forbes Field on game day — has not left me.