For young Phillies fans, a new feeling

The last time the Phillies won anything memorable, Carrie Georgiadis was 7 and in the second grade.

Yesterday, as the hard-luck baseball team from South Philadelphia earned its first ticket to the National League playoffs since 1993, Georgiadis celebrated her 21st birthday.

To her, and to uncountable other Phillies fans of a certain youth, the Phillies always have - make that had - seemed, more or less, to be losers.

"I thought it was kind of just the Philly curse," said Georgiadis, of Mount Holly, a student in the College of Health Professions at Temple University.

"Nobody chooses to be a Phillies fan," she said. "You have to be born into it. It takes a little extra sticking power."

Only 10 times in their 100-plus years have the Phillies made the playoffs. Only once, in 1980, have they won the World Series.

A generation of fans has grown from My Little Pony and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle toys to adulthood without knowing the joys of even so much as the National League title the team won in 1993.

For Georgiadis, yesterday was one big birthday present.

With her, riding north from the ballpark on the Broad Street Subway, was her boyfriend, Mike Tees, 22, of Burlington.

Tees said he could barely remember 1993, when he was 8 and the Phillies won the pennant but lost in the World Series to the Toronto Blue Jays.

Now a mechanical engineering student at Rutgers University, he said he usually has to put up with the braying of the many New York Mets fans in North Jersey.

He was looking forward to some payback.

"I can't wait," he said.

Fans under about 30 had as little personal awareness of the Phillies' World Series victory in 1980 as they did of the team's historic collapse in the last days of the pennant race in 1964, when the Phils were up by 61/2 games with just 12 left to play, then lost 10 straight.

To Rich Krupansky, 28, it is the Eagles who have been the story of his life, even if they have failed to win the Super Bowl.

The Phillies? They haven't had better than a .500 record during most of his years as a sports fan.

"I just started watching the Phillies," he said. "It's been Eagles non-stop."

Krupansky, of East Fallowfield Township in Chester County, spoke from inside Citizens Bank Park as the Phillies were wrapping up a surprisingly easy 6-1 victory over the Washington Nationals to win the Eastern Division title.

Looking ahead, he said, "I'm optimistic, but any Philadelphia fan - you've got to be a little pessimistic."

Stefanie Conroy, 22, who watched with nine friends from Philadelphia's Fox Chase neighborhood, said all she remembered from the Phillies' '93 season was the team T-shirt her father bought her.

She said she can't remember her father or grandfather ever talking about '64, the year that broke the heart of every true fan of that era.

"They probably didn't want to talk about it, if it was that bad," she said.

It took a relative old-timer such as Joe Karwoski, 75, of the city's Mayfair neighborhood, to put yesterday's win in a long-term context.

Karwoski, who remembers attending a ballgame at the now-gone Shibe Park in 1941, said younger fans should not - repeat, not - emulate the negative attitudes of their elders.

"Like all Philadelphia fans, we think we're losers," he said in the 400 level of Citizens Bank Park, where he thumped his cane on the concrete deck to cheer the Phils' win.

His advice: "Avoid the pessimism; enjoy the game."