After over 100 years of being celebrated as “lovable losers,” the Chicago Cubs finally got their act together in 2016 and won the World Series for the first time since 1908. That may have seemed like an exciting thing to witness, considering how many generations of Americans died without ever seeing it happen. But there is one notable downside to the Cubs achieving what many thought was impossible: Everybody who has used “when the Cubs win the World Series” as their own spin on “when pigs fly” now has to actually do the things they said they’d do when the Cubs won the World Series.
Case in point: Filmmaker Ken Burns had declared (at least semi-jokingly, presumably) that he’d add an hour to his 1994 Baseball documentary series if the Cubs won the World Series. Burns previously revisited the series in 2010, adding an episode called “The Tenth Inning” that covered the recent steroid scandal and the Red Sox ending their own World Series drought in 2004, but it seems like he wasn’t really counting on actually having to add a new Cubs-centric hour to the already-massive miniseries.
Speaking with Variety, Burns said that he now feels “sort of obligated” to follow through on his promise, but he doesn’t “know where it fits in.” Eventually, he and collaborator Lynn Novick will “have to go and talk and figure how to go back to it,” but he doesn’t seem to have any kind of timeline in mind. Considering how long it took for the Cubs to pull this off, though, Burns has plenty of time to work out the details.
On a related note, it’s unclear if John Darnielle from The Mountain Goats intends to issue a similar update for his song “Cubs In Five,” but maybe he’s really waiting until The Canterbury Tales shoots up to the top of the best-seller list.