So this is what the opposite of a feel-good story feels like. This is what it feels like when a feel-good story goes for bad, when it takes an unforeseen turn for the very worst.
It is the lingering feeling of hollowness in your stomach and soul that doesn't subside from the initial feeling of sickness that occurs when the reality hits you. That feeling of remorse, then betrayal. The Jackie Robinson West story had all of that. The heaven. The hell. Followed by the information that further implicated JRW as knowing exactly what it was doing when it built a team hoping that no one would find out -- or care -- it was comprised of kids who lived outside the official boundaries of the league. (Kids I've heard some refer to as "illegals.")
Guilt removed any benefit of doubt for Jackie Robinson West, which dropped its suit against Little League International last week for what it alleged was the wrongful stripping of the U.S. title. Guilt removed any resolve the people who emotionally attached themselves to the team during its Little League World Series run exactly one year ago might have been holding onto.
The minute JRW's lawyer, Victor Henderson, filed the motion to withdraw the lawsuit in Cook County Court last week, the story came to an abrupt ending that no one saw coming, only because no one wanted to see it coming.
Falsifying boundary maps to allow kids to play baseball is not a technicality for which the holders of the United States Little League championship should be stripped of their title. Especially when the 13 kids who were on the field of play had nothing to do with the "fraud and cover-up" (as Little League International referred to it in court papers) allegedly perpetrated by the adults running the league.
And as the disgust further sets in, what is Chicago -- a city that is already becoming one of the country's worst examples of what responsible black male leadership is supposed to look like -- left to work through, deal with, accept and own?
Former South Side resident Patrick Morton grew up five minutes away from 105th and Morgan -- the field Jackie Robinson West called home. Like many Chicagoans, Morton's feeling about the circumstances surrounding JRW go deeper than right versus wrong.
"In my eyes they are still the champs and they moved the entire city in a way that our professional teams outside of the Blackhawks haven't been able to in so many years," Morton said. "[Little League International] could've handled the adults without necessarily disciplining the children who did more than just win some baseball games. They united a city that was in desperate need of that very quality."
The racial context of this story is unmistakable. The JRW squad was made up entirely of African-American kids, a fact that wasn't lost on a city reeling from a wave of gun-related homicides, shootings and gang violence that has garnered national attention.
Chicago Magazine senior writer Bryan Smith, who covered JRW for the publication, summed up the feeling of deflation in Chicago after the team was stripped of its title: "The announcement would have hurt no matter how little personal connection I had to the story," Smith wrote. "Like so much of Chicago, so much of the country, I had filed the team's triumph in that part of my heart reserved for the truly good things in life, a story to counteract the daily grimness that seemed to wash up on the shores of the news hourly."
The story of the 2014 Jackie Robinson West Little League team has all the makings of a tragic 30-for-30 film: blurred legal lines; covert racial discrimination; rogue residency practices; co-conspiring officials and administrators; an international organization that dragged its feet; a disgruntled whistleblower; a dogged reporter on a Ken Starr-like mission to uncover the truth and a hyper-segregated city in need of a savior. All of these are the fabric of a story that, once sewn together, reveals that only five of the 13 kids who were a part of a very special baseball team should have been on the field in the first place.
It would be a story that addresses the often overlooked issue of intent, that the motivation of JRW administrators may have been more earnest than just greed and a desire to win the Little League World Series.
It would be a story of how parents in the area come to JRW year after year begging to use the league as a gateway out of Chicago for their children.
It would be a story about how for every Michael Kelley (disgraced JRW district administrator), there is a Christopher Janes (jealous opposing league official whose team lost to JRW 43-2 in the sectional playoffs and who blew the whistle on JRW's boundary falsification, only to later admit he'd been guilty in the past of breaking a residency rule himself). There are antagonists on both sides.
It would be a story of how this was more about the fact that they won than the fact that they are black, but also about how the two are impossible to separate in this case.
What more is there to say? At this point we have to get past the ingrained Chicago mantra of "If you are going to cheat, do it right" and accept the inescapable non-Chicago-bred reality that "wrong is wrong."
When we play out events in our minds, at no point do we normally envision the arc of a fairy tale like the JRW story reaching an ending like this.
What happened to the JRW team is more than just an embarrassment. More than just a crime. More than just a tale of morality and ethics gone wrong. One year removed from when 13 kids began to show us the light, their story has become another painful stain: How fast something goes from star to scar. Proof that the darkest, cruelest side of sports and athletic competition finds life even among the most innocent.