Thanks a million-plus

Billy Penn must be the forgiving sort.

Beneath his statue, hundreds of thousands of Philadelphians - at the very least - finally, after a quarter-century, got to openly exult yesterday over a major sports title by parading through the heart of a long-deprived city.

Penn's "curse," the one somehow tied to city building codes? Absent on a blue-sky Friday, just like his city's hard-earned rep for anger and booing.

Instead, how about Phillies wit' confetti and one formerly benighted town showing up for Halloween as Winnerville?

Phanatic T.J. Hayes brought the champagne to the party at about dawn and left no doubt how he was doin'.

"Are you kidding me? Best time of my life," yelled Hayes, 30, of Marlton, between swigs of bubbly and shouts toward the baseball players gliding past him on a flatbed truck.

On every side of him, a red-clad sea parted.

The city wouldn't estimate how numerous the Phanatics at the parade were, but before allowing the parade through, the masses overflowed intersections and ran 50-deep down some side streets.

How many were there?

Some in the news media guessed two million, about the same number long tied to Flyers parades in '74 and '75, and more than the current population of Philly.

The city wouldn't refute that number, though fitting that many people along the 22,700 feet of the parade route is physically improbable. And the packed-tight throngs had no need for more folks in "Cursed to First" T-shirts to be jammed in among them on the sidewalks, not that the sidewalks held them all.

They climbed fences, streetlights and newsstands. They lined the windows of high-rises and parking garages. They turned rooftops and fire escapes into party zones for hours after the parade. Down toward the sports complex, they stood along a Schuylkill Expressway overpass and swarmed over its embankments like disturbed Phanatic ants claiming a hill.

One Phils fan drank Coors Light in his perch 15 feet up a tree. A few others scaled a statue of Guglielmo Marconi for a better vantage point, though the father of radio communication would probably have preferred they stayed home to catch the broadcast.

You don't miss history for want of a place to stand. Even children with their parents watching got into the act.

Mindful of how long Philly can go between these celebrations, Jen Toren, 32, of Upper Dublin, placed 51/2-year-old Griffin on the parade side of a Market Street steel barricade while she stood back along the sidewalk. He was going to have a view, she said, worth missing school over, since she'd let him skip class and a Halloween party there.

"He has many more of those," Toren said, "but he may have only one of these in a lifetime."

Was a parade worth a day out of class? Leave that to the multitude of teachers who will have to weigh the issue of forgiveness come Monday.

On Broad Street, Joe Gooding of Frankford said he'd tried to do the responsible thing with children Isaiah, 14, and Tyaira, 11, by taking them to school on parade day.