Life & Mortality Quote by Johnny Damon

Damon’s line lands because it’s a locker-room wisecrack delivered at the exact moment a city’s superstition collapses. The Red Sox’ curse-era folklore wasn’t just sports banter; it was a civic identity built on endurance, near-misses, and the strange comfort of always expecting the rug to get pulled. So when he jokes about “busy ambulances tomorrow,” he’s not actually fantasizing about tragedy. He’s puncturing a melodramatic ritual that fans perform every October: the half-serious vow to hang on until the impossible finally happens.

The intent is part celebration, part release valve. Damon takes a sentimental, almost prayer-like fan cliché (“I just want to live to see it”) and flips it into gallows humor. That inversion does two things. It acknowledges how intensely people have invested their lives in the team, then gently mocks the theatrical way we narrate sports devotion as survival. It’s affectionate ridicule: you’re ridiculous, but you’re our kind of ridiculous.

Context does the heavy lifting. Coming from an athlete inside the story, it functions as cultural permission to laugh at the city’s own mythology. The punchline also reframes a historic win as communal chaos, not solemn vindication. “Ambulances” is deliberately over-the-top, a reminder that sports catharsis can feel bodily and real even when it’s fundamentally irrational. In one sentence, Damon captures the aftershock of a long drought ending: joy that’s almost violent, and disbelief that has to come out as a joke.