Aaron “Bleepin’” Boone hadn’t even completed his trip around the bases, and the phone rang.

I was designing sports pages at The Montana Standard on the night of Oct. 16, 2003, and I was still trying to decide if the home run Boone hit was live or one of those annoying replay flashbacks that they kept showing.

Unfortunately, it was live. Boone hit the first Tim Wakefield pitch of the bottom of the 11th inning of Game 7 of the American League Championship Series for a game-winning home run.

In shock, I answered the phone like I always did, only without any enthusiasm.

“Standard sports, this is Bill.”

On the other end of the phone was Dee Scalabrin, a Yankees fan who worked in the advertising department. She was enjoying the game from home.

“Hey Foley,” Dee yelled. “How’d you like that game?”

I just hung up the phone and got back to work as the pain of the crushing loss began to sit in. I was the only one working on the sports desk that night, so, in a cruel twist, I had to write the headline for the Yankees win.

Somehow, I didn’t put any curse words in the headline.

Dee is not the only person to call or text to taunt me after a tough loss by one of my favorite teams. Her call is just the most memorable because of how quickly it came in and because of the enormity of the loss.

Dream-crushing, season-ending losses like that really sting. Losses like the one the Chicago Bears suffered on Sunday sting, too.

It really makes no sense, but for diehard fans, those losses feel like more than a game. It’s almost as if you lost a loved one. Maybe not an immediate family member. More like an uncle you really liked.

That is why some of my Yankees fan friends sent me a tray of pasties after the Bronx Bombers swept the Red Sox in a rare five-game series in 2006. In Butte, that is something we normally do after the death of a family member.

I knew that a Red Sox win on that October 2003 night would have been crushing to Dee — and the many other Yankees fans in my life. And I would have been taunting them had the Red Sox won. Probably not as quickly as Dee, but I would have been hard to be around for the next week.

Or months.

That’s what friends are for. To make you feel even worse at the low points of your life and to rub your nose in their good sports-fan fortune.

We all know those friends who we can’t stand to see happy about their sports teams, so we spend as much or more time cheering against other teams than we do cheering for our own teams.

That’s what is so difficult about this year’s World Series that it involves two of the three most annoying fan bases in baseball. (For the record, I acknowledge that Red Sox fans, like me, also make up a third of that annoying trinity of baseball fan bases.)

As it stands, I am staring at the prospect of dealing with the happiness of my Yankees fan friend Davey Dunmire or the smugness of my Dodgers fan cousin Mike “Skinny” Foley. That is like choosing between a root canal or a colonoscopy.

If only they could both lose.

On Sunday, the Bears lost on a Hail Mary in Washington, and it felt like somebody just reached into my chest and ripped out my heart. The Commanders prayer was answered seconds after the Bears took their only lead of the game. In a split second, I went from being the happiest guy in the world to the saddest.

Immediately, my “friends” Scott Ferguson and Blake Hempstead sent texts to rub in the loss. Nothing like a little salt to pour into a wound.

My dog died last year, too. You want to tease me about that?

Some of my Bears fans friends — like Tommy O’Neill, C.D. Holter and T.J. Lazzari — posted a meme on Facebook that many felt was a joke, but it really was not. The meme showed a picture of a Bears flag, and it had the words “Please respect our privacy during this difficult time.”

Sure, this difficult time during the regular season shouldn’t be more than a few days. By Thursday or Friday, it should be OK to taunt us about the loss. Well, maybe Saturday.

But you should have the decency to respect our pain for a few days.

When the Bears lost to the Colts in the Super Bowl in February of 2007, I went into a weeks-long depression. I did not watch the NFL Network, a then relatively new network that I watched every single day leading up to the Super Bowl, until late March.

I did not watch a single second of the 2003 World Series, but I did enjoy pointing out to my Yankees fans friends and family that it was won by the Marlins.

I used to always marvel at the Montana Tech football team’s ability to get over a tough loss under head coach Bob Green.

Green’s Orediggers won way more than they lost. But on the rare occasion when they lost a heartbreaking game on Saturday, I was always blown away by how positive the team was on Monday.

That carried over to head coach Chuck Morrell and then to head coach Kyle Samson.

I drove by Naranche Stadium in the dark hours of Monday morning, and I saw the Butte High Bulldogs enthusiastically practicing less than 60 hours after their crushing loss at Helena Capital.

When the Bears lose on Sunday, it takes me at least until Wednesday to read any stories or listen to any sports radio shows about the team.

The morning after the Commanders Hail Mary, I couldn’t listen to my favorite show Kap & J. Hood. Instead, I listened to something not nearly as disturbing and depressing. I listened to a podcast about the Menendez brothers.

Jerry Seinfeld said it best years ago. We cheer for laundry. We don’t personally know the players on the team. They don’t know us. If I were to suddenly drop dead, not one player on the Chicago Bears would even know.

Yet, our days — and even weeks — are made or broken based on the performance of men we never met wearing the uniforms that we like best. When our team doesn’t win, we feel better knowing that neither did our friend’s team.

That goes double for our friends who cheer for the Cowboys.

That is why we call and text each other. That is why we beat each other up on Facebook.

That is why Bears fans have turned to memes asking for our privacy during this difficult time. We really want to be left alone for a while because that one really hurts.

Sadly, the pain we feel over sports losses is real.

That very real pain from the 2003 Boone home run even made me feel for Dee when the Red Sox curb stomped the Yankees in Game 7 of the 2004 ALCS. So, I didn’t go to the phone and return the favor a year later.

Because of the pain I am going through this week, I will not even call her to tease her when the high-priced Dodgers finish off the high-priced Yankees in the World Series.

I won’t even taunt Davey after the loss.

Since he is also a Bears fan, it might be more fitting to send him a tray of pasties.

 — Bill Foley, who is going to need some time to get over that Hail Mary loss, can be reached at foles74@gmail.com. Follow him at twitter.com/Foles74. Listen to him on the ButteCast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.