Wait ’till next year, or next millenium?

The cursed Cubs haven’t won a World Series in a century.

CHICAGO (AP) — One hundred years between your last World Series title and the next one isn’t a slump, people, it’s a century.

That’s 14 years longer than long-suffering Boston Red Sox fans had to wait, a dozen more than the hated crosstown White Sox endured, and still 40 clear of the Cleveland Indians, holders of the second-longest run without a championship in major North American pro sports. The last time the Cubs won it all, Teddy Roosevelt was finishing his second term in the White House, a Republican sat in City Hall, and as some people around here never tire of saying, the Dead Sea wasn’t even sick.

But like almost everything else about being a Cubs fan since 1908, it turns out the joke is not just about them, but on them, too. At a Jewish cemetery in suburban Chicago sits a tombstone on the bottom of which is written, in Yiddish, “The Cubs stink.” The occupant of that grave, were he alive, would be 98 this year and probably feeling much the same way.

So ask yourself: What kind of kid learns about curses when he’s old enough to walk and hears testimonials about heartache from grandparents, parents, siblings, cousins, friends, neighbors, even random strangers, and then decides, “That’s for me”?

Political commentator George Will, to name one, though his story differs from a million others only in the details. Will grew up in downstate Champaign, along the fault line that divides Cubs fans from the St. Louis Cardinals variety.

“It was at an age too tender to make decisions, so I just chose them,” he said. “I think it was right around the time I turned 7, but I’m sure it was some time in 1948. I remember that because later the same year Mr. Wrigley took out ads in all the newspapers to apologize for fielding such a lousy team.”

Yet hope really does spring eternal, at least on a Cubs fan’s side of the street. In that same Chicago-area cemetery, a couple who couldn’t stick around to find out whether the team’s unofficial motto — “Wait Till Next Year!” — would ever ring true, decided to roll the dice again in the afterlife. Matching inscriptions on the markers above both husband and wife read, “I’ll Meet You at Home Plate.”

Maybe. But either way, come opening day, more than 41,000 of their soul mates will emerge from hibernation wearing layers of Cubbie blue — hats, coats, sweaters, scarves and scar tissue — and check their sanity at the turnstiles. Then they’ll hope against hope, and in the face of all available evidence and even supernatural phenomena, that this really is that year.

Small wonder, then, that Cubs manager Lou Piniella welcomed his 2008 team to spring training this way: “Don’t put the load of 99 years of not winning on you. Worry about this year only.”

Of course, that’s easy for him to say. Piniella has enough talent to win it all, he isn’t superstitious to begin with, and he wasn’t around when the franchise and its fans stood on the threshold of history, only to be cursed by a goat, crossed by a black cat or undone by one of their own.

To be fair about it, the Cubs rarely needed help losing. Following back-to-back World Series wins in 1907-08, they returned to the Fall Classic seven more times through 1945 and lost every one. They haven’t been back since, and there’s no shortage of theories why.

One thing about Cubs fans that isn’t open to debate: No one has had more fun losing. Most wouldn’t know how to answer the question about whether it’s better to have loved and lost because they haven’t known anything else.