There are certain numbers that for a Boston sports fan have a talismanic quality. 16 – The number of Celtics championship banners hanging from Boston Garden. 4 – The number that Bobby Orr wore. 58 – Grady Little's IQ. Among such figures is 86 – The number of years Boston fans had to wait for their Red Sox to win a championship between 1918 and 2004.

Thus, it came as something of a shock to hear Mitt Romney say during Wednesday's YouTube imbecile parade that Red Sox fans had waited 87 years for the championship drought to end. Some excitable bloggers, aware of my passion for the Red Sox, suggested that I would formally endorse Fred Thompson because of this faux pas.

Of course, I'm not going to formally endorse Thompson, but I will try to explain Romney’s seemingly inexplicable blunder. The Romney family is not a collection of casual sports fans. They're serious fans. They have a few third base box seat season tickets to the Sox; over the last few years, Sox fans grew used to seeing Mitt's head over a right handed batter's shoulder about thirty times a telecast.

Now, Romney may not be a Sox fan who lives and dies with the team. He certainly wasn't born a Sox fan, and you can't be a full member of Red Sox Nation unless you’re born into it. But he was a fixture around here in 2004. If memory serves, he was governor of Massachusetts at the time. And during the 2004 season and post-season, the media pounded the “86 years” theme into our collective skull without mercy. The only Bay State resident who didn't become irrevocably familiar with this figure is the guy who lives down my street who boasts about not owning a TV and vaguely smells of mothballs.

So why did Romney say “87 years” at the debate? He misspoke. He does that sometimes, especially when he's dealing with a topic that he wasn't expecting. Will Red Sox fans forgive him? We are nothing if not a forgiving lot. Multiple world championships tend to mellow a fan base.