Bob Cook

A group of businessmen are sipping beers at the bar in the Billy Goat Tavern & Grill on Lower Michigan Avenue, the place that brought the world the John Belushi/Saturday Night Live “Cheezboorger” sketches. More germane to this conversation, it is home to the Curse of the Billy Goat, which is often blamed for keeping this crowd's favorite baseball team from winning a World Series title.

Successors to Murphy the goat haven't sat right outside the manager's office, on cardboard, blithely eating lettuce since 2003 — better known to Chicago Cubs fans as the Year of Bartman. (The current goat, Billy, is on a farm in Wisconsin, location undisclosed.) Yet on a warm September Thursday, the spirit of the goat, and Bartman, and any other cursed thing that's kept the Cubs from winning a World Series for 100 years, might as well be sequestered in some distant barn. These businessmen are seriously considering that the current Cubs, with the best record in the National League, will end the 2008 season cursed no more.

Tim Hruban, 35, who lives one block from Wrigley Field, is asked what a Cubs World Series title would mean to him. His friends, most Cubs fans except for one Red Sox fan, know what's coming, because they've had this conversation already. “He's gonna cry!” “C'mon, Tim, don't cry.” “He's tearing up!”

“I couldn't even put it into words. It would be the ultimate high.” — Tim Hruban Cubs fan, 35

Hruban, indeed, starts getting a little dusty. “I couldn't even put it into words. It would be the ultimate high.” His father, a lifelong Chicago White Sox fan, got to see his team finally win a Series in his lifetime in 2005, two years before he passed away. Hruban was happy for him. Now he wants the same feeling. He can feel that next year is this close to being this year.

In the manager's office around the corner from the grill where the ethnic Greek for cheeseburger is still shouted long after its status as a national catchphrase is over, Bill Sianis is folding Billy Goat T-shirts for the expected onrush of Cubs tourists. They will flock here even though Sianis' late great uncle, William, is presumably responsible for at least 63 of those 100 dark years.

Sianis, 33, sits down at one of the Billy Goat's dinette sets to explain that, no, his family holds no ill will against the Cubs. And Cubs fans understand that, which is why his restaurant has not been torched. The curse, he says, was his great uncle's beef with Cubs owner P.K. Wrigley over kicking out Murphy at Game Four of the 1945 World Series, even though the goat had its own $7.20 box seat ticket. For years, Chicago Stadium had allowed Sianis to bring Murphy to hockey games, boxing matches, the circus, or whatever else was going on there. So why not Wrigley?

Special feature Title droughts NBCSports.com takes a look at eternal waits for a championship.

Bill Sianis suggests that breaking the curse for good might require the Cubs to let the current goat, Billy, into a ballgame. It can't be a publicity stunt. The goat has to show up and get in on his own merits, whatever those are. Bill says the family just might bring the goat out again this postseason. The last time the Sianises tried — and were turned away — was Game Six of the 2003 NL Championship Series. That would be better known as the Bartman game.

Ah, Bartman. Steve Bartman, the bespectacled, headphones-wearing sap who was unlucky enough to be the one fan among a reaching throng to catch a ball in the left-field stands, a foul that outfielder Moises Alou thought he could catch, the precursor to a Cubs collapse from a 3-2 series lead to a 4-3 defeat to the Florida Marlins.

“I swear, I turned to a friend at work right before that play and said, 'I think the Cubs are going to win the series,” said Paul Otto, 58, of Orland Park, Ill. It's a reminder that a well-coached team stocked with talent having career years might not guarantee success this postseason, not if you've got a 100-year-old monkey on your back.

The Marlins! Nobody goes to their games, and they get two World Series titles in six years! They don't care like Cubs fan do! How about this?

An hour after Sianis explains the goat curse, a couple is doing something that most likely will never happen at Dolphin Stadium. They're wrapping up a day of posing for wedding pictures by getting some shots taken outside Wrigley Field.

Right under the neon sign and LED billboard at the main entrance at Clark and Addison, two photographers are posing Jinwoo Han, 33, and Mee Kyung Ban, 29, of Chicago. They are standing by the Ernie Banks statue, moving to the front gate, and then posing by a Cubs logo to the north of that gate. The photographers are telling them to hold up one hand in a “C” shape.

Helen Lee, Han's sister-in-law, explains that the groom is a big, big Cubs fan, and that the couple spent a lot of dates at Wrigley Field.

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