CHICAGO — Toward the end of the Chicago White Sox’s long and tortured 2024 season, Jerry Meyer, a lifelong supporter and survivor of much Sox-inflicted trauma, wondered if perhaps he missed some sort of announcement. He showed up early to Rate Field, as he often does, to an eerie scene of desertion.

It felt a little like the aftermath of the apocalypse. Or like an abandoned town from an old Western. Even the often-festive Lot B, where the heartiest of Sox diehards gather, was dead, and Meyer thought maybe the game had been postponed or that he had the wrong time.

He can laugh about it now, and he did on Sunday in the hours before the White Sox’s regular season finale. He and his close friend, Henry Radke, had fired up the grill and cracked open a beer or two, and it felt good to be a Sox fan again. All around Lot B, where Radke parked his truck – “4 DA SOX,” his license plate read – it felt like a mass catharsis, and the end of a marathon.

Sox supporters had made it. They’d persevered through three consecutive 100-loss seasons. Through the historic – not so much in a good way – 121 defeats of two years ago. Through the punchlines and flatlines of seasons that felt over before they began. They’d made it through everything to reach Sunday, and the emptiness of recent Septembers gave way to perfection: It was 70 degrees, sunny and cloudless, and the White Sox were headed to the playoffs. The White Sox, losers two years ago of more games than any Major League team in modern history, were headed to the playoffs. It felt surreal for people like Meyer, who carries stories of Disco Demolition Night and who can remember well when Harry Caray was the voice of the Sox, not the Cubs.

“The last three years, we said the tailgate was the highlight of the day when they were losing all the time,” Meyer, 69, said with a laugh. It was still true, at least partially, that the tailgate was the highlight, but now there was some company. Meyer had come to describe recent Septembers as “tumbleweed season” around Rate Field.

A few hundred losses, give or take, will do that.

But now look. On Sunday, the lots around the stadium began to fill in hours before the first pitch. In Lot B, especially, life had returned. It looked more like a college football Saturday than a Major League Sunday matinee, what with the haze of grill smoke and the aroma of charcoal and meat, and home-brought Sox flags rippling in a soft breeze. And all around, a shared sense of … Elation? Relief? Gratitude?

Chicago’s best party of the season – at least to this point in early fall – came on Sunday on the South Side, all around West 35th Street and Shields Avenue. It wasn’t fancy, or exclusive. Everybody was invited.

Among the attendees were nuns who arrived by bus and kids who brought homemade signs. There were Sox lifers, like Meyer and Radke, and people who’d adopted the team when they arrived as immigrants, like Gustavo Chavez.

“Chef Gustavo,” he called himself, and for good reason, showing off the steak he’d grilled to perfection, alongside some finely marinated shrimp. He’d been a Sox fan ever since arriving in Back of the Yards in 1985 from Mexico, and though he’d moved around some since, “the roots start all over again,” he said. He felt compelled to come out on Sunday.

“I’m home,” he said, standing in the footprint of the old Comiskey Park.

The many defeats of recent seasons hadn’t bothered Chavez too much, he said, because “it’s a game … it’s up and down,” and besides, by Sunday the misery of the past was but an unkind memory. Never mind that the White Sox finished with a relatively modest 84 victories, or that they’d lost their tenuous lead in the AL Central.

Never mind the quirk of the playoff format that has the Sox on the road in a wild-card series against the Houston Astros, who finished with a worse record. If Sunday proved indeed to be the final time the White Sox play at home this season, at least they went out winners. On the field, yes, with a 4-2 victory against the Colorado Rockies, but also off of it, where they won back some trust.

Few franchises in professional sports, after all, have put their supporters through more than the White Sox have in recent years. Two years ago, the relatively few fans who did show up toward the end of the season arrived with a kind of morbid desire to see history. And even then, the Sox let them down by sweeping their final homestand, and losing No. 121 on the road.

In his empty section of the stands, Meyer played a one-man game of call and answer.

“I yelled out,” he said, “and I heard it echo all throughout the stadium.”

Signs of promise emerged late last year, though, and earlier this season, after another typically inauspicious beginning, a strange thing started to happen: The White Sox started winning. With a young core, they reached an equilibrium – never too high or low – and continued to hang around, and hang around. Not unlike the loyalty of their most ardent supporters.

Two years ago, amid all that losing, the Sox couldn’t even lose right. Victories in their final three home games robbed their most loyal or perhaps most twisted fans of the chance to say they were there when the Sox became the most futile team of the modern era. This past weekend, people arrived to the South Side to the most improbable of messages on the Rate Field marquee:

“Clinched,” it read.

“It’s awesome,” said Tom Karpinski, a retired police officer who sipped a beverage in a packed part of Lot B early Sunday afternoon. “I think it’s awesome for the city. Awesome for the South Side Sox fans. I’ve got a buddy that’s been a season ticket holder for years. …

“I’m happy for him because he’s been with them through thick and thin.”

And much thinner, lately. About an hour before first pitch on Sunday, the party peaked outside of Rate Field. The patios at Cork and Kerry and Turtles, the two nearby neighborhood bars, were full. Most of the parking spots in Lot B had long been occupied.

Many a beverage and burger had been consumed in a kind of communal, celebratory feast. Bill and Pam Imes, Sox fans who’ve been married for 44 years, sat in camping chairs in front of their truck and took everything in. They were among the few who came out for the home finale two years ago.

“Nobody was here,” Bill Imes said.

“And they stunk,” Pam Imes said, with a laugh.

But now it was a beautiful Chicago fall Sunday and the White Sox were postseason bound. Now those 100-loss seasons were gone and hope and the faith had been rewarded.

“It’s not fun,” Bill Imes, 71, said of all the recent losing. “But it’s baseball,” and as a lifelong White Sox fan, who began going to games in the 1960s, with his grandfather, he understood better than most what the game could take.

And now, what it could give.

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