Christopher Borrelli‘s Chicago Tribune think piece on “Building a baseball story: 7 lessons Red Sox can teach Cubs” invokes that most famous of sports stories, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” which Borrelli calls “a kind of gospel of the Red Sox, as hallowed as a prayer in New England,” written, of course, by John Updike.

“Like the New Englander he became, Updike romanticized the Red Sox, both ups and downs.

“He fed the narrative,” Borrelli writes, offering ideas on how the Chicago Cubs can “serve its narrative and wrangle its history, broaden its reach and nurture its relationship with fans” and it involves the celebration of pop culture’s baseball embrace. He recalls one saturated moment in Boston:

“Driving to Fenway from the diner, I flipped through the radio: On a sports station, a former Red Sox player was telling stories about how former manager Terry Francona would sit naked on the toilet during meetings in his office. Someone on local NPR was reading from Updike’s classic. On music stations, songs about the Red Sox, songs that have become synonymous with Fenway, ‘Dirty Water’ and ‘Sweet Caroline’ and ‘Shipping Up to Boston’ and Jonathan Richman’s ‘As We Walk to Fenway Park in Boston Town.’ A Budweiser commercial has a bro doing a bad Boston accent, giving an opening-day rally speech that makes no sense in 2017: ‘We’re Boston! We’re not supposed to win!”

Part of that pop-cultural narrative includes the story of how Theo Epstein and the team’s new management “slapped Updike’s words on that wall, alongside the water cooler” to inspire players.  He might as well have broken into a chorus of Fiddler on the Roof‘s “Tradition”. . . .