Taxi! Even with the crushing loss to the Yankees in the ALCS, the 2003 Red Sox deserve kudos as a true band of brothers BY CHIP YOUNG

Did we have fun, Red Sox fans?

You betcha.

The American League Championship series with New York, nee "the pennant," was a combination of delight and trauma before the Olde Towne team crashed and burned in its inimitable fashion.

All the tired lines about this year’s Red Sox not being the infamous "25 players, 25 taxis" of yesterday have been beaten into submission. But even before "Cowboy Up" became a phrase more evocative of New England than the Wild West, this team showed more emotion than a decade of predecessors. Can you imagine the top of Yaz’s head not exploding if he ever saw the Karaoke Rally Guy, Kevin Millar, up on the big screen at Fenway, doing his college-era version of Dance Fever?

For that matter, can you imagine any of the old BoSox players following Millar’s lead to shave their heads? Juvenile? Of course. Unifying? Without a doubt. Even Grady Little, that wild and crazy guy, got a buzz job, roughly the equivalent of Calvin Coolidge getting a tattoo of a naked woman on his forehead.

The BoSox clown car followed a tough road, but it got more respect and admiration than any Fenway club I can recall. I’m not even a big Red Sox fan, but if a cardiologist had been sitting next to me during the ninth inning of Game Five of the Oakland-Sox ALDS, he could have started scrubbing down for surgery. Derek Lowe coming up with arguably the two biggest strikeouts in recent memory sealed the deal as far as allegiance is concerned, even as my friends in New York — who carried the Red Sox banner on hostile turf — were being talked down from the ledges outside their Manhattan apartments.

Speaking of that game and the new-look Sox, I have a mastodon bone to pick with Fox TV announcers Thom Brennaman and former Boston utilityman Steve "Psycho" Lyons, who climbed all over Manny Ramirez when he watched his series-winning dinger against Oakland sail into the stands. Admiring your handiwork or overdoing your celebrations (also mentioned by this duo in regard to Lowe’s fist-pumping after his game-ending K) is supposed to be bad form in baseball. I’ve always adhered to the sweaty science philosophy that when you score a goal or do something exceptional, you should act like you’ve actually done it before. In this case, though, neither Manny or Derek had been in such a position, so I wouldn’t have cared if they took off their clothes and mamboed around the entire ballpark.

Lyons, a lousy player who made his reputation by dropping his pants at first base to clean out the infield dirt from a head-first slide, was nothing more than a well-liked curiosity on a bad team, along the lines of the famed "Choo Choo" Coleman and "Hot Rod" Kanehl of the famed ’62 Mets. Incompetents with a charm usually reserved for the mentally challenged. So Stevie, shut up, and tell Brennaman to do the same. All I know is that Manny, for all his aloofness, laziness, and selfishness, deserved to savor his moment in the sun (Well, ok, klieg lights). Ditto for Derek, who showed more brass than any Sox pitcher in ages, including Pedro and Roger Rocket. (Ooh, still can’t say those two names without a twinge of angst.)

Ah, Pedro Martinez. Another player who the media and general public now love to hate, which suits me down to the ground. What could that old gerbil, Don Zimmer, have been thinking when he tried to wrestle with Pedro? This might become one of the most famous baseball "fights" in history, right up there with Roger Clemens throwing a broken bat shard at the Mets’ Mike Piazza, and Juan Marichal playing the vibes with a bat on John Roseboro’s head in a long-ago Giants-Dodgers game. Sure, Zip was beaned a couple times when he was Pee Wee Reese’s heir apparent at shortstop for the Brooklyn Dodgers. And you have to love the old fist-faced gamer for constantly standing up to that fat, loathsome lout, George Steinbrenner, whenever his fellow coaches or manager Joe Torre are castigated by the Yankees’ obnoxious owner. Even his tearful apology after the episode was touching. But Zip, there’s no way you’re ready to take on a man 40 years your junior, especially not in front of a full house at Fenway Park.

Still, that conflagration added even more spice to what became an amazing postseason for the Red Sox. This is a team you could really like, so different from editions that had all the charm of a conference of morticians. And I blame neither Pedro for wanting to stay in Game Seven against the Yanks, or the freshly fired Grady Little for supposedly not having the balls to pull him. I thought all those reminiscences about the good old days of America’s pastime were founded on scenarios of ace pitchers hanging in on guts when their best stuff was gone and their arm was hanging off, and the grizzled manager having enough respect for the player to give him that chance.

Not that it was all fun and games before the final bow, like David Ortiz breaking a 0-for-16 schneid with a game-winning two-run double against Oakland in the eighth that nearly blew the roof off every sports bar from Bridgeport to Bangor. The extreme sports collision between Damian Jackson and Johnny Damon was perhaps the worst baseball crash anyone has seen, with Damon getting laid straight out after hitting heads in midair with a second baseman running blind and full-throttle into short centerfield. Playing soccer, I’ve seen many head-to-head numbers end up with blood everywhere, and this topped the lot by a long shot.

That’s the sort of high profile — for better or worse — the Red Sox acquired this year. Part Curse of the Bambino, part Sox-Yankee feud, part, "Can we play the Cubbies in the Series?" An anonymous scout, quoted in Sports Illustrated, called Jason Varitek a dirty player for blocking the plate without the ball (say hello, Eric Byrnes). Manny drew as much criticism at times from Boston fans as their rivals, and Pedro was radioactive when he walked out for Game Seven in Yankee Stadium. But perhaps the most unspoken failing — high treason hereabouts — was the postseason tanking by three of the most popular Sox players as the team headed down Interstate 95 for the final two games. Yes, that would be Cowboy Kevin Millar, AL batting champ Bill Mueller, and, gulp, Nomar Garciaparra, late wake-up call not excluded. Nomar is as close to God as you get on the Sox, but the disturbed murmurs were all too apparent from even those with the dual red socks tattooed on their biceps. He was just waiting for the World Series, right?

Yet despite the ultimate failure with the ALCS largely in our back pocket, we all owe a tip of the cap to a team that constantly defied the odds, hit like no other nine in the majors, and laughed at themselves as shaved-head rally monkeys while being a true band of brothers. Do you think you can actually get 25 guys into one cab?