Lifetimes of pain, heartache fade away with a certain hex

ST. LOUIS -- What's next?

Machines that can fly? Food you can take out of the freezer and heat up for dinner? Moving color pictures you watch in a box in your living room?

The Boston Red Sox win the World Series. There's a sentence nobody has been able to write since 1918. The Boston Red Sox win the World Series.

Johnny Damon basks with the World Series trophy and plenty of champagne to go with that.(AP)

Things that have been invented since the last Red Sox World Series title: The pop-up toaster (1919) ... the Band-Aid (1920) ... the traffic signal (1923) ...

Say it till you believe it: The Sox won their first World Series in 86 years in stunning and dramatic fashion on a chilly Wednesday night in St. Louis, leaving the Cardinals red-faced during a Curse-busting, 3-0 Game 4 victory that put the exclamation point on a four-game sweep.

And while we saw it coming over the past 48 hours given the lopsidedness of this series, still, it isn't as if the Red Sox haven't been within one strike of winning a World Series before watching it go down the drain before (hello, New York Mets and 1986). Now, at the stroke of midnight CT here, more than an hour after the game, hundreds of Red Sox fans are crowded behind the visitors' dugout, several members of the Red Sox and their families are in one moving mob on the infield and they're partying like it's ... 1899?

They might just party for another 86 years.

Overnight, it's a different world.

"I don't even think we know what it means," center fielder Johnny Damon said.

Yes, let's give this time to sink in.

"I haven't cashed in the feeling yet," first baseman David Ortiz said. "I know we won the World Series. I was walking around watching everybody, but I haven't (gotten) to where I want to be."