About 18 months ago, I made a wonderful new friend through a community organization that has nothing to do with baseball. So it wasn’t until earlier this year that the Red Sox happened to come up in conversation, and as is so often the case when that’s the subject and I’m involved, I began to wax verbose. Eventually she stopped me, but not because she wasn’t interested: instead, to my surprise, she said she wanted to schedule an evening to hang out so I could tell her more about it when we both didn’t have other places to get to.