MythBusters

It's particularly humbling when you find out that something you'd believed for years turns out to be a myth. I just had such an experience, or at least I think I did!

Something made me remember a strange 'fact' that has haunted me for nearly a decade, and I thought to share it with the readers here so they could similarly wake up in the middle of the night, in a cold sweat, at the very thought of it. But, as is my wont these days, I figured I should do at least a modicum of virtual legwork in order to be sure of my details before opening my big mouth and sticking my foot into it. So I did a Google search of what I was looking for, and very quickly discovered my 'fact' was actually the stuff of urban legend!

Here's what I thought I knew, though admittedly I'd never checked it against the source but rather believed what I read: In Back to the Future II, there was a line of dialogue in which one of the characters reads a page of the Sports Almanac Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) brings back from 2015, and says something to the effect of, "Florida won the World Series in 1997? What a load of crap! Florida doesn't even have a baseball team!" Now, this film came out in 1989, at which time Florida really didn't have a baseball team (let alone two of them, as they do now). However, Florida Marlins did in fact win the World Series in 1997, in a shocking upset over the Cleveland Indians, becoming (I believe) the first Wildcard team to win it all. So, doesn't that all give you goosebumps? It certainly did me, and it jived with my vague recollection of the details of the movie.

But it turns out such was not the case. Instead, the only mention of a Florida team in the movie, apparently, is a sports broadcast Marty sees that declares that the Cubs just beat Miami in the World Series, in 2015. Not quite the eerily accurate prediction that I'd been so freaked out by (although who's to say the 2015 prediction still couldn't come true?)

To read more about this, click here. You can also read a similar debunking on the Wikipedia page for the movie right here.

At least now I can stop obsessing over this particular bit of nonsense!