Byline: Nathan Graziano

For English teachers, the stack of essays that need to be graded at any given moment is notoriously referred to as “The Pile.” The Pile of student essays starts to grow early in the course and doesn’t relent until your final grades are submitted. The Pile is daunting. The Pile is a horrible, ubiquitous, nightmarish entity that always lurks in an English teacher’s periphery at all times. 

I woke up on Sunday morning and noticed a tick on the one anatomical place no male wants to find a tick. 

I should now probably mention—seeing this is essential to your understanding of the rest of the story that I’m about to unfold—that the basement is the one place in the world that has been designated as my own space. I write in the basement, and I watch sports on the flatscreen in the basement. All of my books are in bookcases in the basement, and all of my sports paraphernalia, movie posters and the motley art that hangs in my basement.

There is such a man, and he goes by the name of Herman McDerman. But I must also mention to you that Herman McDerman is not a man, rather an eraser and a character that I created when I was in the fifth grade. 

Almost nightly now, for months, I’ve been vicariously living through the characters in the show, arguably one of the most successful sitcoms of all-time. There is something about “Cheers,” more than three decades after the series concluded in 1992, that still speaks to our collective understanding of comradity, conviviality and community.

So when Netflix dropped the docuseries “The Clubhouse: A Year with the Red Sox” on April 8, I couldn’t wait to dive into it. Not only have I been a Red Sox fan since birth, but—as aforementioned—I’m “a fan of the game.”