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FLORENCE, Italy -- Fiorentina owner Andrea Della Valle says Adem Ljajic will remain with the Serie A club. The Serbian striker is in negotiations to renew his contract, which expires next year, and Della Valle says "I have spoken to Ljajic and he tells me he wants to stay with us, which is already an important step." AC Milan reportedly made a 7 million euro ($9 million) offer on Friday and Della Valle says "if there has been an offer, we are still far from the players real value." However, Della Valle says Ljajic will be put on the transfer market if he does not sign a new deal in the next two weeks. Alex English Jersey .B. -- The Baie-Comeau Drakkar took over sole possession of first place atop the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League on Thursday with their sixth straight win. Will Barton Jersey . Just as Montreal was settling into the first full working week of a new year, the Impact announced the appointment of their new head coach. http://www.nuggetsprostore.com/kids-jarred-vanderbilt-nuggets-jersey/ . 4 Villanova with a 96-68 drubbing on Monday. Wragge hit 9-of-14 from behind the arc, matching Kyle Korvers school record for 3-pointers in a game set in 2003, as Creighton (16-3, 6-1 Big East broke a conference record with 21 treys in the rout. Thomas Welsh Jersey . The Brazilian goalkeeper signed a loan deal with the Major League Soccer club on Friday as he looks to get playing time ahead of this summers World Cup in his home country. Jamal Murray Nuggets Jersey . But Bourque, who has missed three games with a lower-body injury, wont be in the lineup when the Habs travel to Buffalo to take on the Sabres on Wednesday. Pretend youre Hazel Nilson. Its 1955, youre in your 40s, and youre shopping for a new Ford.The salesman is telling you about the new options available for the first time this year: factory-installed air conditioning, wooden appliqué side moldings, and this strap on the seat that you can snap around your waist to keep you from flying out the windshield in a collision. Seems like it might be uncomfortable, and youve never flown out the windshield before, but ... well, youd sure like to live to see the Cubs win a World Series.You get the seat belts. And, while youre at it, the moldings. Good choice, Hazel.If theres anything we learned in the moments before and after the Cubs finally won their third World Series, its that a lot of people were living for this moment, just as White Sox fans in 2005 were staying alive to see their club win one, just as Red Sox fans were trying to hang on long enough to see Boston win one. Is there anything in baseball still worth staying alive for? Yes, though the answer to that question is far more speculative than it was one week ago.On a team levelNo, the Indians World Series drought does not immediately get promoted to national crisis just because the Cubs drought has been retired. But were operating on a long timeline here -- I plan to live at least 50 more years, and Im optimistic youll make it to 100, which gives us plenty of time for things to get historical.Consider the Cubs, for instance. It had been 108 years since they last won the World Series, but in how many of those years would it have seemed like this? In 1909, a Cubs championship would have been only 24-point news. In 1910, hardly noticed. In 1935, an L.A. Times article headlined Cubs Beat Cards Twice, Clinch Flag doesnt mention anything extraordinary about the Cubs making the World Series. When did the Cubs drought become The Cubs Drought?The answer is going to vary by the fan, but a reasonable estimate is going to be not less than 60 years, and probably a decade and a half more than that. In a where-are-they-now piece on Ernie Banks, the writer Rich Cohen assesses the state of Cubs romance in 1969, when Chicago blew a late-season lead to the Miracle Mets: At this point it had been 24 years since the Cubs had played in a World Series. A drought, but not epic. In other words, here was a chance for the Cubs to win and for their fans to live normal lives. Its as if, in 69, two roads diverged, and the Cubs took the one less traveled by: the losing road, where misery begets misery and wearing a Cubs hat is a way of letting people know you are holier, for your kingdom is not of this world. Emphasis mine; emphasis crucial.A decade after that, the Cubs were seen not so much as cursed as just a really, really lousy organization. Decades-long complaints about cheap ownership and management were focused on just how bad the Cubs were -- not so much unlikely to win the World Series as unlikely to produce a good product, period. Fans protested in front of Wrigley in 1981: For the first time in modern Cub history, there is evidence that the fans are tired of being the dinosaurs of the National League, a newspaper account at the time said.As to the drought: It was a relatively minor storyline. When the Cubs went to the playoffs in 1984, the date 1908 doesnt appear in The New York Times article announcing it. Instead, the Cubs (and the Tigers) were sentimental favorites because they are among only 10 franchises still in place since the turn of the century; they have remained in their historic, urban ball parks; they have resisted the evils of artificial turf, and they were the opponents in the last war-affected World Series, in 1945, when pennant-winning teams didnt need a crap-shoot league series to qualify. A few years before that, in 1979, a Cubs pennant push was acknowledged with just the faintest touch of romance by the L.A. Times, Pennants dont come easily to the Cubs. They won their last one in 1945, their last World Series in 1908, back when Tinker and Evers were playing catch with Chance. Theyve had some famous nosedives since.The Billy Goat curse, to that point, seems to have been little more than a local gag, especially among the writers who hung out at the Billy Goat Tavern. Legendary metro columnist Mike Royko didnt mention the curse in his 1970 obituary of the goat-owning Bill Sianis. By 1997, when Royko wrote his final column, he launched it with this: Its about time that we stopped blaming the failings of the Cubs on a poor, dumb creature that is a billy goat. This has been going on for years, and it has reached the point where some people actually believe it.So somewhere between 1984 and 1997, the Cubs drought became not just a living thing, but a life source all its own, spawning its own storylines, emotional breakdowns, self-fulfilling prophecies and legends that some people actually believed. Cleveland has, by that timeline, only a decade or so to go to match the Cubs for droughtiness.Its not a given that itll ever be the same for Cleveland, though. There are twice as many teams to beat now as there were in the Cubs first half-century of futility, and the number of teams that are going to have outstanding droughts could multiply. As is, eight teams have never won a World Series, including the Rangers (who began play in 1961), the Astros (62) and four other teams birthed in the 1960s or 1970s. Seven teams have droughts of 48 years or more, long enough for their teams local Eddie Vedder or John Cusack to bemoan the total absence of baseball euphoria in their lifetimes. To a middle-aged Brewers fan, there is practically no difference between her angst and that of a middle-aged Cubs fan.One way this might play out is that the very forces that make Cubs-like droughts more possible could make them more diluted -- that the Indians might go 150 years without us ever caring about them on a national scale. Or perhaps we wont become jaded to the long sufferings of long-suffering fans, and more droughts will just mean more empathy.If that happens, we could live to see Cleveland win fairly soon. The Indians already have their own curse, as reported by the L.A. Times in 1984:After Bobby Bragan was fired as manager of the Cleveland Indians in 1958, he stood on second base at Municipal Stadium and proclaimed a curse against the team. At least thats the way the story goes.To remove the curse, a self-proclaimed witch, amid a cloud of burning herbs and incense, performed an occult ceremony Friday at the same spot [where] Bragan was said to have stood 26 years ago.The witch ... asked to be identified only as Elizabeth. ... Calling on a supreme goddess, she said: Remove the curse that was put on the Cleveland Indians by a rather misguided individual.That curse is not nearly as famous, but maybe now that Cleveland is the droughtiest team in baseball, it will take on late liffe as surely as the black cat and the smelly goat did related to the Cubs.dddddddddddd A few good fictions and theres no telling how much well come to embrace the poor Clevelander.On a personal levelI grew up in the perfect era for record-breaking: The records that defined baseballs history were both old and under constant assault. I saw Pete Rose break the hit record, Rickey Henderson break the stolen-base record, Cal Ripken become the iron man, Nolan Ryan pass Walter Johnson in strikeouts, Mark McGwire topple Roger Maris. There were a dozen cards in every set just commemorating the records that had been broken the year before.Now name a record thats been set since Barry Bonds hit his 756th home run. Francisco Rodriguez and Mariano Rivera set new saves records, but the save didnt even exist 50 years earlier and the closer barely did before the mid-80s. Various strikeout-rate records have been set, but nobody cares. Aroldis Chapman probably throws harder than any pitcher in history, but we know that only because of technology that didnt exist for most of history. Ichiro did something -- consecutive 200-hit seasons, maybe? -- that qualifies more as a Fun Fact than a record. (Its not a record if nobody had ever thought to follow it beforehand.)Not only are there few records being broken, but there are almost none under threat. Pitchers dont throw nearly enough innings, or start nearly enough games, to approach any of the counting-stat records, either for single seasons or careers. The offensive era that goosed so many record chases in the 1990s was killed by legislation; the reckless baserunning era expired in the wake of the games strategic evolution. The only prestige record in any kind of danger at all is career home runs, and were so cynical these days that anybody who hits too many home runs -- record levels of home runs -- is immediately treated with suspicion.But there is one personal achievement that is, theoretically, as plausible now as it was when it was set, and its built for our live-look-in media: the hit streak. Nobody has come close to Joe DiMaggios 56 games, and if MLBs Beat The Streak game is any indication -- nearly 100 million entrants, and nobody has reached even 50 -- its really, really hard! The average major league hitter gets at least one hit in about 66 percent of games, which means that we should see a 56-game streak in one out of every... oh, 16 billion trials. A season has a lot of trials, of course, but if every hitter and every pitcher and every game were exactly average, wed see a streak like this every 500,000 or so years.But players arent all average, and given the distribution of talent on the far end of the tail, someone is disproportionately likely to do it. Ichiro, for instance, from 2001 to 2010, got at least one hit in almost 82 percent of his starts. If my math is right, and my assumptions are reasonable, we should expect a streak like DiMaggios in about one in 50 Ichiro careers. So thats all we need: 50 versions of the most singular player of our lifetime. Cool, cool.The worse those odds, the more well love it if somebody gets close. Nobody besides DiMaggio has topped 44 since 1900 (or 45 before that), which would give us all a powerful two-week buildup to the final mark. And unlike a home-run chase, or Miguel Cabreras Triple Crown, the margins between history and not history would be inches every at-bat -- there would be an urgency for almost every plate appearance, like the urgency of the ninth inning of a perfect game.For a variety of reasons -- fragmented culture, cynicism about cheating, a relatively modern awareness of how outside factors like ballpark, era, rules changes and so on dictate when records are set -- I dont expect to ever care about a record the way we cared about Ripkens streak or McGwires 62nd. Maybe if somebody undeniably clean takes the career home run record. Maybe something so outlandish (a 50-game winning streak, a 19-year-old hitting .450) that Im not bothering to imagine it. But Im there for the 57th game of a hitting streak, and Im there partly because I know youre all there, too.On a historical levelWe are not likely to see the first female major leaguer in 2017. There are no women in the affiliated minor leagues, no woman was drafted in the June draft, and no woman is playing Division I baseball. Most girls are steered away from baseball and toward softball at an early age. Baseball at the highest level is a single-sex sport, and whether this is sustainable for the rest of our lives is an open question, as all questions about the future are.Clearly, from MLBs perspective, its sustainable in 2017. Major League Baseball is popular. Commissioner Rob Manfred is not fending off constant scandals about the lack of women on major league rosters. It is generally accepted that women are excluded from play not because the sport is sexist (though composition of front offices doesnt exactly rule that out), but because the male body is generally different than the female body, and because there is no widespread development system for female outliers to get baseball experience or be discovered.But were talking about our entire lifetimes here. Its not hard to imagine a future some decades from now when we make a cultural decision that spending our billions on a field where women are entirely absent -- even by the influence of biology -- is unacceptable. Unacceptable not because any of the people at the top of the sport are bad, or uncaring, or sexist, but because it is simply not good for the culture to celebrate a boys-only club. (I wrote a book about a baseball season and regret how utterly it fails the Bechdel test. My 5-year-old has asked me whether girls are even allowed to play baseball -- and periodically asks again for reassurance.)This is entirely speculative, but a half-century gives us plenty of time to speculate with. If baseballs maleness does become an economic, political or cultural liability, I dont know how it will get handled. Will we regulate performance-enhancing drugs in a semi-legalized way that allows an even playing field for male and female bodies? Will MLB invest in youth baseball for girls, creating a broader pool of young players from which elite standouts might emerge? Will the game actually go co-ed because its determined to just be better than way, as the independent Sonoma Stompers did this summer? Can a separate, professional league be viable enough to solve this? Are these speculative solutions problematic in their own ways? Theyre all questions that we might struggle with before were 108.But there couldnt be a cooler story in baseball right now than seeing a woman play in and succeed in the major leagues. Its worth staying alive for. ' ' '