CUMBERLAND — The World Series begins Tuesday night, and baseball fans in a major Midwestern city are awfully excited. The Cleveland Indians haven’t been Major League Baseball’s champions since 1948, when they won a quintet of post-season games in an eight-day span.

Things have changed radically since then: Their one-game playoff win over the Boston Red Sox that year took 2 hours and 24 minutes to play, and their four World Series triumphs over the Boston Braves lasted (in order) 2 hours and 14 minutes, an hour and 36 minutes, an hour and 31 minutes, and 2 hours and 16 minutes.

That’s an average game time for those five contests of exactly two hours, which is about as long as it takes to play five commercially polluted, pitching change-fraught innings of just about any televised game these days.

However, despite Cleveland’s nearly seven-decade stretch without a World Series title, America hasn’t embraced the Tribe as lovable, long-overdue underdogs in this year’s Fall Classic because their opponents, the Chicago Cubs, are even more victory-starved.

The Second City North Siders last won the series in 1908. That was the same year that a 46th star was added to the U.S. flag (representing the state of Oklahoma), Henry Ford produced his first Model T automobile and women couldn’t vote in the November presidential election (or any other elections, for that matter).

Even the terminally hard-hearted must concede that 108 years between championships is a long drought, so it’s no wonder much of America has embraced the suddenly formidable Chicagoans. But giddy Cub fans should proceed with caution.

Not long ago, another large group of avid baseball fans was championship-starved. As the 21st century began, the Boston Red Sox hadn’t won the World Series since 1918. But even more galling to New England baseball enthusiasts was the success of their team’s arch-rivals, the perennially snooty New York Yankees.

The only emotion even close to the limitless devotion that Sox fans had for their team was antipathy for the haughty, perennially successful (26 titles) Bronx Bombers and their arrogant and entitled followers. Not only were the despicable New Yorkers perpetually obnoxious winners, but the contemptible manner in which they obtained their titles, outbidding every other team for the game’s top talent just because they could, truly stuck in Boston’s collective craw.

Then came the magic autumn of 2004, when the Sox stormed back from a 3-0 deficit to eliminate the hated Yankees in the American League Championship Series, then swept the St. Louis Cardinals in four straight World Series contests, ending their 86-year title drought.

Demons exorcised, the team rapidly won two more titles, in 2007 and 2013, and contended for several others.

But new and deep-pocketed ownership began overpaying already-wealthy mercenaries every bit as rashly as their New York rivals ever did. A top Sox pitcher-pundit who fancied himself an entrepreneur defaulted on a $75 million loan from the state of Rhode Island, later getting fired from a cushy sportscasting gig for issuing more insensitive and inappropriate sound bites and tweets than anyone not currently running for president.

And the two best hitters on Boston’s 2004 and 2007 championship teams tested positive for banned substances, causing speculation that the team’s powerful offense was at least partially fueled by performance-enhancing drugs.

This year’s Sox improved by 15 wins over 2015, jumping from last place to first in the process. But less than 24 hours after their elimination from the American League playoffs, much of the team’s rabid fan base, egged on by agitators masquerading as columnists and bloviating talk radio hosts, shrilly demanded the ouster of the team’s manager.

Winning that elusive championship in 2004 ended 86 years of frustration in New England. But it also helped turn once-cuddly Red Sox Nation into the Evil Empire North. These days, the only discernible difference between fanatical Boston rooters and foaming Yankee fans are the accents.

No one outside New England currently considers the Red Sox underdogs, or even remotely lovable. Everyone, it seems, hates a too-frequent winner.

Good luck to the Chicagoans in their efforts to break a 108-year title-less streak. But Cub fans should be careful what they wish for.

They just might get it.

Correction: This story was updated at 10:44 a.m. on Oct. 25, 2016 to correct a reference to the Second City North Siders.