The Curse is over.  This is the headline of today's sports section of the Chronicle.  There's a curse?  What unlucky thing did we do to start the curse?  They talked about the Red Sox being cursed from 1918 to 2004. 86 years.  Our curse was very short by comparison, only 6 years.  And our curse was what?  Failing to win the clinching game of the first round of the playoffs.  Again much smaller in comparison than failing to win a World Series in 86 years.  Our curse is so small and tricky to understand.  We faced elination in 2000 in game 4, and Zito flattened the Yankee's asses that day.  We didn't seem to cursed then.  Only twice in those 4 years did we win the first 2 and lose the next 3.  I think what really sucks is this 5 game format.  For all we know, if any of those series were 7 games, the A's would have had a championship under their belts in the last 6 years.  Maybe 5 is the curse.  Ahhh the pentagram!  Sign of the Beast.  Or is that 666?  I get my curses all mixed up.  I guess the media needs something to talk about, and this was all they could think of today.  I'm the one talking about the magic of the A's all the time, I guess I should expect this sort of BS from the media.  I don't think it is curses that cause series to end a certain way, it is mistakes.  The Twins obviously made WAAAYYYY more mistakes than the A's did in these 3 games.  From the boot by Bartlett which caused Santana to get too tired to pitch the 9th game 1, to the bad play by Tori in game 2, to the E by Morneau in game 3 that allowed Scutaro's heroics, the Twins played worse defense.  Mistakes are magnified in the playoffs because all the teams are good.  Good teams capitalize on mistakes.  The A's are a good team and they didn't make the costly errors.  And so endeth the short, small and tricky to even understand how to define curse.  If a curse can be only 6 years long, could it also be one year?  Could it last one game?  Could it last one inning?  Could it last one pitch?  I never hear the announcers say, "Thomas swung and missed on that pitch so badly, I think he was cursed for only that one pitch."  No that's silly, everone knows it needs to go at least 4 years to be a legitimate curse.