Yankee Stadium was always that place one dared not go, at least if you weren’t a Yankees fan. And I’m not. Far from it. Well maybe not that far, my team’s owned by a personality known throughout the city for demanding excellence, has bankrolled the team to competitiveness… and we wear pinstripes.

But the similarities mainly end there. Being a White Sox fan is tortuous for all of the best reasons, all of the reasons you ever become a fan of anything. The Sox play second fiddle in the city of Chicago and much of the midwest to the more illustrious (albeit the lustre acquired from decades of ritual losing) Cubs. The manager is bat shit crazy. Which makes him more beloved. The players underperform. Joe Crede in his walk year has gone off with back spasms typically reserved for octogenarians. Then we’ve only gone and brought one in in Ken Griffey, Jr. The whole league hates our catcher. The bullpen veers between genius and inconsistency at an alarming rate. You just never really know which team is going to show up.

I never thought I’d get the chance to see us play at Yankee Stadium. The real Yankee Stadium, not the one they’re building for the future. I looked at the schedule, kept turning through the months until I finally found our visit to my adopted hometown: the last week of the existence of one of the most famous stadia of the world. I tried to get tickets at various stages in the season but to little avail. Eventually someone at work tipped me off to a friend in the finance department that might be able to hook me up with the company seats. Sometimes they’d auction them off to the company. I couldn’t let that happen. I told folks I’d do whatever to help them get tickets to see their team if, when the White Sox came to town, they’d help me out.

At the end of the day, the Yanks were long out of the pennant race come September and no one wanted to go see them, so I managed to snap up the tickets quite easily. Jonny Warbucks was in town on business, collected me at the office in his rental car, and we drove uptown. I had gone off memory trying to get there so having got lost in East Harlem, we decided to bust out the trusty GPS and actually find the bridge to the Bronx. This is why they built the subway – there’s no point trying to drive anywhere in this city.

My Red Sox loving friends always told me Yankee Stadium was like a Hitler youth rally, such was the venom of Yanks fans towards opposing fans. You wouldn’t know whether you were going to see a breaking ball or a book burning. I decided to chance it and go in wearing the kit, the black road jersey representing the colours of the only team in baseball that, in white and black, hasn’t actually got any.

We sat in the lower deck, toward the back, but with an incredible view. Just a hundred or so feet away was the batter’s box where LEGENDS stood for generations. It was hard to believe that small piece of history – where Ruth, Gehrig, Maris, Mantle, Dimaggio, Jackson, and the others who sat in the opposing dugout once stood – would soon be gone. This was the end, or almost the end at any rate. Plenty of future hall of famers on show. Pettitte’s status will be up for some discussion at the end of his playing days, but no one will argue with the contributions of Jeter… Rodriguez… and on our side, Griffey! No matter how slow he was at getting down the lines, he’s still got that grin, that swing! The most perfect swing. That’s baseball.

Gavin Floyd was a legend on the night. He threw 116 pitches. At one point, Ozzie goes out to the mound for a chat and you think “right, that’s his day done” and Gav stays in the game! The Yankees fans in front of me turn around and go: “you actually LIKE this guy?” We love Ozzie. At least I do. There’s something about him. You love a manager that calls out your team when they underperform, that’s honest. You want to hear him call Wrigley Field the dump that it is amongst your cross-town rivals most successful season in years. You want your manager to have fight and passion. Because YOU have fight and passion for YOUR TEAM!

After several nervy innings, we held on. Juan Uribe of all people came up with the big hits, Thornton and Jenks shut down the Bombers and walking out of that stadium, you saw White Sox fans everywhere. We went into their home and gave them a beating! It’s something you’ll never forget.

And the Yankees fans? Maybe it was the lack of relevance of the game, but they couldn’t have been more friendly. Though there were easily hundreds of White Sox supporters in attendance, I was the only one in my area and all the Yankees fans around were having a great chat throughout the game. About baseball, about the stock market, about whatever. Because at the end of the day, the magic in baseball isn’t the ninth inning home run. It’s the fact that it brings people together to share an experience, to enjoy the night. The stadiums aren’t shrines to the game, they are shrines to the experience.

And my boys slew the great Yankees at the altar. Marvellous.