David Ortiz looked at me and laughed. I’d just asked him what made the city of Boston the perfect place for him to blossom into a Hall of Famer. “Boston,” Papi told me, “has the best nickname that any city can ever have. It’s the city of champions.”

Papi’s comment was especially funny because, just a few weeks earlier, Ben Affleck had described Boston to us like this: “if you were from Boston, you were a born loser. That was kinda it.”

 The chasm between those two quotes was closed over the course of four extraordinary nights in Boston and New York in 2004, when the Red Sox came back from a 3-0 deficit to defeat the Yankees in the ALCS and eventually win their first World Series in 86 years. The story of that comeback has been told before. Believers is not just a rehashing of the Roberts steal or Curt Schilling’s heroics. Instead, it’s a cultural history, a love-letter, a tomb to what it really means to be from Boston and sit in Fenway as a fan. It’s not a baseball story, not really. It’s about what it means for a tribe to transform for one viewpoint (Affleck’s) to another (Ortiz’s).

This show was a joy not only because I recall that 2004 World Series so well, nor because I could relate so much to my own experience as a Cubs fan. But also because of the creative challenges: How do you tell a story like the Red Sox that has been examined and re-examined in a fresh way? How do you create a sports story that has nothing to do with sports? And also, how the heck do you make a show for ESPN that features subjects as disparate as Matt Damon, Bill Burr, Johnny Damon, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson and make it all make sense? 

“When the Red Sox finally, finally won in 2004, it was as if the history of the state and the history of the city got much better as a result,” Pulitzer Prize winning historian (and Sox fanatic) Doris Kearns Goodwin told us. “I think it did partly change the psychology of the city, making the city feel more confident in itself, less defensive, less concerned about the past.

“Maybe that's laying too much on baseball,” she said. “But not if you're a baseball fan.”