As many of you are aware, I’m a loyal Red Sox rooter. I am also a Certified Yankee Hater, and get just as much pleasure from seeing them get eliminated from the playoffs as Boston making them. It is not exactly a fair or healthy sentiment, but it is clearly an emotional fact, and it was never more obvious than last night.

In the top of the 8th inning at Yankee Stadium, Boston’s Mookie Betts hit a bouncing double down the line to break a scoreless tie and lead to a 3-0 Red Sox lead. The team needed just one win or a Toronto loss to win the American League East. Minutes later, the Orioles came back and defeated the Blue Jays up north on a dramatic pinch home run to officially give Boston the division pennant. Was I elated? Sure, but there was one more piece of the prize I still needed.

The Yankees’ tragic elimination number was down to one as well, and a Boston win on Bronx turf would not only be especially sweet, but would send my arch enemies to southern golf courses for the winter. What I didn’t count on was Craig Kimbrel taking the mound for the Sox and proceeding to urinate all over their celebration cake. He gave up a leadoff single, then walked three straight guys and was pulled off the mound retiring NO ONE. Poor Joe Kelly was summoned, valiantly set down the next two Yanks before the about-to-retire Mark Teixeira slammed a game-winning grand slam—an event as predictable as the sun rising in Maine. I killed the television before the ball even landed, and was absolutely miserable for the rest of the night. I should have been as elated as the Red Sox players, who I saw video of later, champagne-bathing each other in the clubhouse, but I was so livid from how the game ended it was like they had won nothing.

I admit it: My hatred of all things Yankees is abnormal and possibly pathological. All I know is that unless they’re removed from the postseason, it’s nearly impossible for me to relax and enjoy it. Sure, they can be mathematically dispatched tonight rather easily, but somewhere in the darkest recesses of my mind I can see them hanging on for another day, then sweeping the Orioles at home this weekend and tying them for the final wild card spot. Because until the Yankees are beheaded and entombed in their graves, they just won’t die, and last night’s game was just another one of God’s cruel jokes.

When I was a kid in the early 60s, the Yankees won the pennant every single year, then returned in the mid to late 70s to torment me anew. While I loathed the Steinbrenner Yankees of Jackson, Chambliss, Piniella, Rivers, Nettles and Fuckin’ Bucky, I didn’t feel that way about their players in the late ’90s at all, and especially respected Derek Jeter. By then, though, the Yankee “mystique” and national media obsession with them (which still hasn’t abated despite their current mediocrity) rankled me more than anything.

In the past few weeks, however, even after Boston swept four games from them at Fenway Park, and I delighted in watching the Yankee elimination number drop daily, a new form of floating anxiety was tempering that joy—and I knew exactly what it was. The upcoming first debate between Clinton and Trump was making me very uneasy. Suddenly, the idea of the Yankees making the playoffs was taking a proper back seat to the prospect of an ignorant, racist and sexist Nazi crook making the White House.

Clinton’s performance in the actual debate did a lot to relieve my stress about that, however, meaning the ball field events the next few nights should have been a relaxing walk in the park.

Nope. Not for me. Not with the way that second damn game went down. I felt a little better after ranting to my fellow Red Sox fan Darin on the phone afterwards, but it still wasn’t enough. It was off to Twitter to rant a little more:

Unable to sleep this morning, I was up at five to drink coffee and work on my novel. An hour later, Teixeira’s arcing home run was still haunting me as I sat in morning traffic.

So here I am now, and thanks for listening. Deep down, I know this anxiety will all be over soon.

I think.