At 11:40 last night, Patrick – the bartender at Byrnes – flipped from TBS to the Weather Channel, ending the 2008 Red Sox season in the process. There would be no comeback, not this time, not this year. Now it’s time for golf, or if your’re Mikey Lowell, hip surgery.

The story of Game 7, as far as I’m concerned, is not terribly complicated: Lester pitched a very good game, while Garza pitched a great one. Yes, Lester no hit them for the first three, but Garza might as well have been throwing BBs. The onetime head case pitched inside to left and right hand batters, he threw hard, and he was locating two different breaking balls. Frankly, it was something to behold. If you weren’t a Sox fan, that is.

Had you told me last week that the Rays would take the series by beating Lester twice, I would have bet substantial cash that you were wrong. But in the end, the better, healthier team won. Neither Lester nor my watching from a venue in which I had been undefeated in the playoffs could have derailed the Rays on a night like that, one in which Garza channelled Josh Beckett, circa 2007.

With a bit of time to regroup, I find that I’m a bit hollowed out but ok. As are most of the people that I’ve spoken with and/or read. I’ve been very pleased to see that the reactions, by and large, from the fanbase reflects my own feelings: gratitude for another excellent summer of baseball, respect for a well constructed young club that played with a lot of heart, and hope for the future. We didn’t win a championship, and that hurts. It’s crushing, actually. But neither will I succumb to the Yankees mindset, in which anything less than a championship is a failure.

If we had ended this series by being shutout in Game 5, despair and anger would have been understandable, if still not productive. But in pushing it to Game 7, battered and facing long odds – as long as you’ll see – this year’s edition of the Boston Red Sox earned my respect, and I believe they should have yours.

Heading in to the offseason, we’ll have a lot more on what just happened and what might happen next, but for now I’d just like to congratulate the Tampa Bay Rays on a well played series, and thank the Boston Red Sox for a run that made us all proud, even as they fell short.