Chris Satullo: A civics lesson from the Phils

The Phillies (bless them, their children and their children's children) have done their part to lift The Curse.

Now, it's up to the rest of us to do the harder part.

The Curse has never just been about dropped passes, missed free throws, strikeouts with a man on third, or pucks through the five hole.

Those 25 years without a parade - which ended so gloriously, raucously and sunnily yesterday - hurt so much because they were an emblem of deeper woes.

In a place like, say, Seattle, the teams haven't won anything for a long time either, but folks there don't treat it as a bleeding civic wound.

Here, it hurt so much because, deep down, we feared we really were a city of losers.

Well, guess what? We're not. We never were. What the Phils have done, praise the Lord, is to rip the scales off our eyes. Our

world champion

baseball team is far from the only thing in this town that is world-class.

Maybe the Fightin's can teach us all how to expect, recognize and cheer success as ardently as we have feared and booed defeat.

For too long, we've been a city, a region, that no longer grasped the the storied wisdom of Tug McGraw:

Ya gotta believe.

Our response

: Yeah, right.

Who you kiddin'?

Just like a losing team that never advances the runner or turns the double play, we've been stuck in bad habits of nursing grievance, stifling hope and expecting trouble.

Particularly for lifelong residents, this stems from too many years of being buffeted by global winds, from too many betrayals by those elected to serve, from having to fight so desperately just to keep their block decent and their children safe.

Somewhere, for so many, all that congealed into a sour, cynical negativity. Sometimes, listening to us grouse, we sound like the Can't-Do Capital of the Universe.

I'm not a native. I've been here only 19 years - a total newbie. But here's the thing: Like thousands of others who've moved here and fallen in love, I get exasperated with our Loserville habits.

I've had plenty of chances to leave Philly. I never have, don't expect I ever will. There's no city on planet Earth where I'd rather live, no place that can match its savory mixture of beauty and grit, soul and scruff, history and histrionics.

And let me tell you: When the city is splashed in sun and wears a grin, the way it did yesterday, there's nothing like Philadelphia.

We have plenty of civic winners among us, extraordinary people who dream and do, then do some more. But we have this way of making them pedal uphill, against the drag of our nay-saying. We load them down with a weight of quarrels and quibbles; if they get too much momentum, we poke a stick in their spokes.

Tell you what. Let's not do that anymore. Let's cheer on and support our civic heroes - the Mary Scullions, Jane Goldens, Lily Yehs, Jeremy Nowaks and Lorene Carys - the same way we do Chase and Ryan and Jimmy.

In the last few days, I've heard so many say that when Brad Lidge's knees hit the turf at Citizens Bank Park on Wednesday night, as Ryan Howard raced toward him like a joyous locomotive, they couldn't quite believe it. They didn't know how to behave.

They'd been so busy waiting for the deluge, bracing for the pain, expecting that one broken-bat single off Lidge in the ninth to lead, in some brutal, fated way, to another broken heart.

But, today, our hearts are full, not shattered. It feels outstanding, but a bit weird. For so long, we've located our pride in how much pain we can handle, how much disappointment we can shoulder.

That's something Philadelphians should never lose, their glorious stubbornness, their willingness to show up and work hard no matter the odds. The difference now, maybe, is that we can start believing that all our hanging in, our refusal to quit, will be rewarded by something grand - not just by a new load of pain that we're perversely proud to bear.

We've been stubborn to endure. Now, let's work on being stubborn to excel.

This championship isn't once and done. It's time for a civic winning streak.