But I'm here to tell you that with 92 years left in the century, we'd better keep an eye on Chicago.

Even before we consider baseball and the 2016 Olympics, there's the best spectator sport of all, politics. The Democrats decided months ago that their presidential candidate would be from Chicago. Forget all this talk about Kansas, Kenya and New York. The question was whether the Democratic nominee would be from the South Side or the Northwest suburbs.

The White Sox fan beat the Cubs fan, as it turned out.

Don't look now, but "Creeping Chicagoism" is slowly taking over the nation. Open your sports section to the baseball standings and what do you see? The Cubs and White Sox in first place. In June. September it's not, but June isn't bad. The last time the Cubs had the best record in baseball this late into the season was 1908, which happens to be the last year the Cubs won the World Series.

Yes, it's been exactly 100 years since the Cubs were the best team in baseball at the end of the season. Philadelphia fans think they are long-suffering, and we have heard just about enough of all the pain and agony of the over-rewarded Red Sox faithful, but no major pro sports team in existence this long has been title-less this long.

The "anyone can have a bad century" T-shirts and jokes undoubtedly will multiply if the Cubs keep winning games as they've been doing of late, including nine consecutive victories before Wednesday night's game, eight in a row coming from behind.

But fate delivers Chicago sports observers an added bonus: the White Sox. It had been 88 years between championships for the Sox when the South Siders finally won the World Series in 2005.

Put the two teams together and they are futility's twins. It has been 31 years since they both have been in first place in their divisions past the end of May, but that 1977 season didn't end so well, with the Sox finishing in third place and the Cubs in fourth.

Even worse, the two teams haven't been in the playoffs at the same time in 102 years. (These truly are breathtaking amounts of time, aren't they?) It was 1906 when the White Sox defeated the Cubs in the only all-Chicago World Series.

So it should come as no surprise that every morning, Chicago native and National Public Radio host Scott Simon, the best-selling author of Windy City and Home and Away, circles both the American and National League Central Division standings in the paper with his 5-year-old daughter Elise. Then they give each other a knowing look and, in unison, chant, "Subway Series!"

"It's the only just reward for a century of deprivation," said Simon, godson of the late Chicago baseball broadcasting legend Jack Brickhouse. "Nothing less than a Subway Series will satisfy me."

Do they dare say those words? Do they dare think them? Why not, asks Mike Ditka, the former Bears coach whose name is still synonymous with Chicago sports.

"What's happening now is that the Sox are a good team, they really are, and the Cubs almost look like a team of destiny right now," Ditka said on the phone Wednesday. "The Sox won a few years ago, of course, so I think it would be the greatest thing in the world if the Cubs won the World Series. That would be bigger than when the Bears won the Super Bowl."

Speaking of droughts, that's 22 years ago — but barely no time at all in Windy City baseball lore.

Chicago has never hosted a Summer Olympics, which is hardly a disgrace considering no U.S. city other than St. Louis, Los Angeles and Atlanta has put on the Summer Games. But Wednesday, the International Olympic Committee put Chicago in its Final Four for the 2016 Games, along with Madrid, Tokyo and Rio de Janeiro.

The final decision will be made in October 2009. So for the next 16 months, Chicago sports fans will have to wait. It should be no problem for them. After all, that's what Chicago sports fans do.

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