By Jim O'Sullivan
News Editor

Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, the World Series trophy walks into this one.

Last Friday was a banner day at the Eire Pub, venerable redoubt of Boston sports fanaticism, which hosted the touring hardware and one Doug Mirabelli, on whose new contract the ink has not yet dried, as well as hundreds of local Red Sox fans. Mothers extracted children from school, businessmen emptied skyscrapers. The crowd packed the Eire for two hours, filing in before 11 a.m.

Joe Morrison was there. He works with mutual funds downtown. He held trophy-sized nephew Matthew McDevitt, who at six months was born midseason, while Morrison's sister, Suzanne McDevitt, held Katie. At 18 months, she lived through the heartbreak of last season, but nevertheless seemed nonplussed by the occasion.

"You'll thank mommy later," Suzanne told her bawling daughter as they walked out from behind the bar where Mirabelli signed autographs and posed for pictures.

"It's like this everywhere," Mirabelli said, anxiously eyeing a hot pastrami sandwich on rye that awaited him near the cash register. "Everybody's really extending themselves and it puts smiles on faces everywhere. This city's been smiling for two months now."

Lowell was next to smile, hosting an afternoon rally downtown and then a benefit dinner with the minor league Lowell Spinners. But the trophy could've gone anywhere. Since Keith Foulke flipped to Doug Mientkewicz and Manny Ramirez ran in from left field with shirt tails flapping like so many pennants and David Ortiz's bat was sent to Cooperstown to be used as a measuring stick for all postseason slugging, the smiles have been frozen in place all over New England.

And still, seven weeks after futility was vanquished utterly, and eight weeks after the New Yorkers were conquered dramatically, it remains the elated unifier that leads to old men in saloons groping for enough words to tell their happiness. Joe Reardon, 77, was in the Boston Braves organization as a young man and in the stands the day Ted Williams homered in his last at-bat. He was watching from his living room on Ely Road when they won.

Rocky O'Connell, 74, lives on Ely, too, but he was in Chicago coming back from the Boston College-Notre Dame game when Hell froze. A sports fan of wide travels, he's been to spring training in Fort Myers the last 13 years, along with Jim Dennis, 75, originally from Dorchester and now of Quincy, who drank beer from a glass on Friday.

Like a man in Heaven complaining about altitude sickness, Dennis griped, "The worst thing about it is it'll be crowded next year down there. It's a pain in the neck now, with all the people who go."

Isn't it better than a ringless offseason and an empty City of Palms Park in March? "Oh, thank God," Dennis said.

For others, the day marked their first pub visit. Lynn Rogers brought four kids, as young as three and as old as seven, with her, two of whom left school at St. Ann's early. When they were seat-belted in the back of a minivan, she asked whether an audience with the Sox back-up backstop and his baubles was worth missing school.

They nodded.

Mirabelli, a native Arizonan, was asked to gauge the day's weight against the pub's other moments of historic import. He looked around. People stood in the stockroom waiting to have their pictures taken with the trophy. Out on the sidewalk, others barked into their cell phones, hurrying along those who would miss it.

"I'm gonna say they're more excited to see the World Series trophy than the presidents," Mirabelli said.

Hardly a man is now alive who recalls the second-most recent World Series trophy come to Boston. And so hundreds met it and embraced it at the Eire on Friday, joyous pilgrims to a golden crown. For all the toasts that have been offered and all the tankards hoisted in that institution over the years, few have been accompanied by the redemptive closure that drenched Friday's.

Joe Morrison looked at his nephew, clad in an infant's Red Sox singlet that Mirabelli had just signed. "Hopefully, it won't be another 86 years for him," he said.