Motivation Quote by Ryne Sandberg

There is an athlete’s particular kind of grief in Sandberg’s line: the loss isn’t just personal, it’s civic. “It didn’t happen” is blunt to the point of self-protection, a refusal to dress up failure with excuses. Then he pivots immediately to gratitude - “fortunate for the two chances” - as if thanking the baseball gods for even letting the door crack open. That swing from disappointment to appreciation is the emotional rhythm of being a Cub in the pre-2016 universe, when contention felt rare and fragile and October heartbreak was practically a local dialect.

The key phrase is “for Cub fans.” Sandberg isn’t centering his own resume or legacy; he’s treating the World Series as something owed, or at least long overdue, to a community that kept showing up. It’s an admission that stars in Chicago don’t just play for wins; they play inside a multigenerational story where loyalty is the point and the payoff keeps getting postponed.

Context matters: Sandberg was the face of some excellent Cubs teams in the 1980s and early 1990s that got close but never broke through. In that era, Wrigley wasn’t the shiny nostalgia brand it later became; it was a shrine of stubborn hope. His sentence captures the quiet burden of that: when you come up short, you don’t only disappoint yourself. You disappoint a city that taught you how to keep believing anyway.