Cubs Fans are Freaking Out Over the Back to the Future Curse
This is heavy.
Coming into this season, the Chicago Cubs were supposed to be a year away from contention. With their long rebuild nearly complete, 2016 would be the year when it call came together.
But no one told the players, and the plucky upstarts on the north side of Chicago just kept winning. This is the year, they seemed to declare. The year to lift the curse of the billy goat, to forget about Bartman and to live up to the prophecy foretold in Back to the Future II. This was a year for the Cubs to win the World Series.
Not any more. On Tuesday, the Cubs lost game three of the NLCS as Joe Maddon’s supremely talented band of phenoms looked like the Cubbies of old, bumbling and uncoordinated, desperate to wrest defeat from the jaws of victory.
Now fans have a new scapegoat: the movie that gave them hope in the first place. Call it the curse of Back to the Future II, the movie that prophesied a Cubs World Series win, by sweep, on October 21, 2015. Instead, the Cubs might get swept themselves tonight and miss out on their best chance to reach the World Series in over a decade.
First there was the "Curse of the Billy Goat", the "Steve Bartman incident", and now the "Back to the Future jinx"?
The @Cubs are close.
— Cody (@CodyStormPanic) October 21, 2015
So if the Cubs get swept is it going to be called, "The Back To The Future Curse.
— Cardsfan65 (@Stlcardsfan1965) October 21, 2015
The world probably ended once the Cubs won the World Series so someone went back in time wrote back to the future just to jinx the Cubs
— k!ng David (@CalKingDavid) October 21, 2015
Ok … did Back to the Future II jinx the Cubs?
— Agus (@aguspim) October 21, 2015
If the Cubs lose tonight, will they refer to the NLCS loss as the "Back to the Future" curse? #cubscurse #backtothefuturecurse
— Jesse Hamilton (@JesseJHamilton) October 21, 2015
Will the Cubs have a new curse after tomorrow? The "Back to the future" curse? Will only be lifted when every known copy is burned #GoCubs
— Hawkrageous12 (@Hawkrageous12) October 21, 2015
It’s hard to come down too hard on these fans. This is the way of the Cub. With logic incapable of explaining a century of atheltic ineptitude, they’ve turned to the fanciful and cinematic for comfort. And to their credit, it’s not hard to imagine the baseball gods smiting the Cubs this year. How dare they presume a World Series win because a 26-year-old movie predicted it? For a franchise so steeped in superstition, that’s more than enough reason to concoct a new curse.
But hey Cubs fans, unless something crazy happens and your team digs itself out of a 0-3 hole, there’s always next year! And this time, that actually means something.
Photos by Jamie Squire / Getty Images