EVERYWHERE IN THIS FAVORED LAND the sun is shining bright, everywhere bands are playing and every heart is light. Everywhere men are laughing and everywhere children shout. There is even joy in Mudville because not one Phillie has yet struck out.

We should know better, you and I, than to get pumped up on opening day of the baseball season. But after a century and a quarter of opening days, Phillies fans have acquired the instincts of lemmings hurling themselves off a cliff into a raging sea of 162 games where all Phillies teams have drowned except one in 125 years.

I've just finished a sobering new book called "The Rise and Fall of the 1977 Phillies: How a Baseball Team's Collapse Sank a City's Spirit" by Mitchell Nathanson, a lifelong Phillies fan and an associate professor at Villanova Law School. It should be required reading for every fan who forgets the Phillies past and is doomed to repeat the heartbreak of every Phillies season except its single championship in 1980.

The book chronicles the history of Philadelphia and professional baseball through the prism of a nine ninning game played in October 1977, Game Three of the National League playoffs in what would be instantly enwreathed in the hearts of Phillies fans as Black Friday.

It was a "you had to be there" day at Veterans Stadium that never shook with the lung power of fans like it did in the bottom of the second inning when Phillies fans literally hooted Dodgers pitcher Burt Hooton into walking in three bases-loaded runs. A stadium that was never so silent as the bottom of the ninth after the inexplicable disaster that unfolded in the top of the inning.

It was like watching the two-week collapse of the 1964 Phillies take place in a matter of 20 minutes. You who are too young to remember are born with this dreadful losing Phillies DNA in your baseball fan genetic makeup, like a renegade gene to some fatal disease where the odds are 125-to-one against.

The books's unlikely thesis is that "the city of Philadelphia is a baseball town that passionately hates its baseball team." That may sound strange in the era of the feel-good young Phillies coming off a division-winning season.But we're talking about a franchise that made headlines in 1923 for arresting an 11-year-old boy who refused to return a foul ball. The kid spent the night in jail and was charged with larceny, until a judge released him with a stern lecture to the Phillies management. The Phillies made baseball history by establishing the right of a fan to keep a foul ball.

And our Fightin's made history of a sort today when tied 6-6 in the ninth inning our closer Tom Gordon gave up four of the five runs our bullpen would allow in an 11-6 loss that would be the first of 2008. God, I love being a Phillies fan. It hurts so good.