How sportswriters described the Red Sox winning the 2004 World Series

As joyful and satisfying as it can be for Red Sox fans to revisit the miracle of the 2004 World Series after two decades, it can be difficult — perhaps impossible — to fully place themselves back into the mindset of that earlier, tortured era.

Standing on the other side of 2004, replete with its legendary run of New England sports championships, it’s tough to travel back to the Before Times, when the Red Sox were defined by drought and heartbreak.

So, amid the 20th anniversary of that magical time, here’s a look back at how sportswriters — locally and nationally — covered the first Red Sox World Series win in 86 years.

The mere act of writing that the Red Sox were champions probably felt like a mountainous task for sportswriters, especially those with local connections. How does one encapsulate decades of disappointment being redeemed in an instant at the end of a miraculous story?

For Bob Hohler of The Boston Globe, it involved equal parts history, religion, and — using the inimitable nickname bestowed on the team by Johnny Damon — a reference to “The Idiots.”

“Hail the lovable idiots. Bless the baseball gods,” Hohler began in his recap of Game 4 of the World Series. “Raise a cup to the good souls in Red Sox lore — from Ted Williams and Joe Cronin to Gary Waslewski and Pumpsie Green — who chased but never captured the game’s greatest prize.

“The Red Sox are champions of the world.”

As had become an accepted part of Boston baseball lexicon, the winning of the World Series meant the breaking of “the curse.”

Boston Globe sportswriter Dan Shaughnessy, author of the original book, “The Curse of the Bambino,” was appropriately among the first to chronicle the passing of an age.

“No more Curse of the Bambino,” he wrote. “No more taunts of ‘1918.’ The suffering souls of Bill Buckner, Grady Little, Mike Torrez, Johnny Pesky, and Denny Galehouse are released from Boston Baseball’s Hall of Pain.”

On a more basic level, the moment elicited pure joy and an outpouring of emotions.

Having forged his career in sports media as an early internet blogger going by the name, “The Boston Sports Guy,” few were better positioned to summarize this feeling than Bill Simmons (then of ESPN).

“HOLY $%#%@%@ #^%#$@#$@!!!!!!,” Simmons wrote after the last out (in what was then his characteristically over-the-top style). He followed it up with a slightly more eloquent reaction.

“Forget about ending the curse and having 86 years of baggage erased in one fell swoop,” wrote Simmons. “If you don’t get emotional watching a group of guys celebrating and hugging when you feel like you know them, when you suffered all the same highs and lows, when you spent the last seven months with them … I mean, why even follow sports at all?

“Just called my Dad,” Simmons added. “Been waiting to make that call my whole life. ‘It happened in my lifetime!’ he keeps saying. As an added bonus, the apocalypse didn’t happen.”

After being defined by history — and all of its negative connotations — for so long, part of the magic of the 2004 victory was that it allowed Red Sox fans to happily revel in the present.

Succeeding where so many previous iterations had failed, that year’s Red Sox were undaunted by the weight of the team’s previous shortcomings.

“History is what you make of it, and these Red Sox, these wonderful, shaggy-maned Red Sox, have given us a new history on which to dwell,” Concord Monitor sports editor Sandy Smith noted. “A history starting with the 2004 World Championship.

“Though these Red Sox call themselves idiots, we know better,” she said. “They’re idiot savants, experts in baseball and perseverance.”

And after years of being subjected to the machine-like, formulaic dominance of the clean-cut Yankees, the Red Sox win was a celebration of something different.

“Revel in this unorthodox group of athletes, who danced to their own beat, purists be damned,” Boston Globe sportswriter Jackie MacMullan explained. “Marvel at their uncanny ability to rise from the ashes, and resurrect themselves in the most improbable of situations. No baseball team had come back from a 3-0 deficit to win a playoff series until the Red Sox pinned that indignity on their most hated rivals, the New York Yankees.”

For as much as winning the actual World Series was the true goal, marking the official “breaking of the curse,” the most poetic (and, for Boston fans, cathartic) experience of that postseason was still the ALCS win over New York.

“Emerging from a 3-0 abyss in the American League Championship Series, the Red Sox rolled off eight straight wins,” wrote Boston Globe columnist Bob Ryan. “Three outs — make that three Mariano Rivera outs — away from a humiliating sweep by the Evil Empire, the Boston Red Sox have put together the most devastating run in the history of postseason baseball, winning the last four games against the Yankees, then dispatching the St. Louis Cardinals in an official World Series sweep.”

Understanding the full weight and legacy of the 2004 Red Sox was impossible to fully grapple with in that moment.

Yet what was instantly clear was that the events of the previous few days would live on forever in the hearts and minds of sports fans everywhere.

“In the last 11 days,” reflected Washington Post columnist Thomas Boswell, “the Red Sox have provided baseball with enough drama, lore and incredible improbability that one winter may not be sufficient to discuss it all.”

He would be proven right, over and over again in the ensuing years (right up through present day). Anytime a 3-0 series deficit has been confronted since then, the 2004 Red Sox are held up as one of the only examples of a team that managed to escape the seemingly insurmountable hole.

Fundamentally, the catharsis of 2004 was about people. Specifically, the players who had engineered a miracle, and the fans who had endured year after year of suffering only to emerge on the other side with, at last, the euphoria of victory.

In the hours after Game 4 of the World Series, it was a time in which everything else melted into the background, leaving only those who savored every moment.

“It is the greatest bond in sports, forged through the biggest heartache in sports, and today, heavens to Buckner, it has won,” wrote Bill Plaschke of The Los Angeles Times.

He chronicled the scene in St. Louis, focusing on those who lingered in the Red Sox’ hour of victory.

“The final cheer came from perhaps the largest group of visiting fans ever witnessed at a World Series, several thousand that stuck around long after the final out to serenade its stars as they paraded around the field like giddy high schoolers,” said Plaschke.

“Having waited all this time for a championship, they were deserving of a few extra minutes, no?

“Even the riot police smiled,” Plaschke observed.

“‘Thank you, Red Sox,’ the fans chanted. ‘Thank you Red Sox.’

“Thank you, indeed.”