So how much time is 86 years, really?

Any tormented New Englander feverishly twirling a champagne bottle in an ice bucket Wednesday night could give a two-hour soliloquy on the significance of the digits 1-9-1-8 in their sleep.

Yep, you were savoring the thought of that celebratory beverage. And it probably didn’t occur to you that the last time the Boston Red Sox won a World Series, the Prohibition movement didn’t want your ancestors to even consider such merriment.

The 18th Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified a few months after that win, prohibiting the manufacture, transportation and sale of alcoholic beverages. Of course, Prohibition went over almost as well as the Sox – then the dominant team in baseball – trading away their superstar for the equivalent of a partridge in a pear tree.

And so it became a part of world history. Just like Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and two guys named George Bush. None of whom was born when Babe Ruth and the Sox clubbed the Chicago Cubs in six games.

Margaret Thatcher and Martin Luther King Jr. weren’t alive, either.

Ending war?

We were at war then. The War to End All Wars, it was said. Hey, good to know that hyperbole isn’t a new phenomenon with our political leaders.

Men fortunate enough to return home from that conflict in Europe encountered a dramatically different world. Two years later, many of their wives would be granted the right to vote.

Having $100 underneath your mattress was the equivalent of $1,247 in a safe-deposit box today, according to a handy calculator supplied by the American Institute for Economic Research. And oh, what tantalizing, new uses for that wealth.

Frigidaire released its first, wooden electric refrigerator at a price tag of $775.

More than the average new automobile, in other words. The Model-T Ford Club of America reports that a coupe cost $560. But make that $695 for a sedan.

Chevrolet countered with the introduction of its first eight-cylinder model in 1918. Check out this self-promotion in a booklet preserved by the Old Car Manual Project:

“The Chevrolet eight will appeal to a class wishing to enjoy the charms of driving an automobile in which the motor does not lapse in its power impulse but furnishes a driving force as constant as the flow of Niagara.”

Just like the Red Sox of 1918 and 2004 themselves, no?

No instant replays

Forget television highlights or even a pitch-by-pitch account on radio. Neither medium was a public phenomenon yet.

However long it took Mainers to hear the news of another Boston victory, though, you can bet they received it with gladness. That’s because in 1918, when we say baseball was the national pastime, it was the national pastime. Football, basketball and hockey didn’t have a big-league presence in America yet.

If you forget to set back your clocks one hour this Saturday night, thank the same folks that banned booze. Approved by Congress for the first time, time zones and daylight-saving time were born in 1918.

So were actor Art Carney, twin advice columnists Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren, and cinematic canine Rin Tin Tin.

Before there was such a crisis as a flu shot shortage, there was the Spanish flu. It killed 25 million people worldwide in a six-month span of 1918. Twenty-eight percent of the U.S. population caught it.

Once the dreadful disease ran its course, however, life expectancy in America rebounded within three years.

To 60. Or 62, if you were female.

Doctors didn’t have the luxury of penicillin, which was discovered in 1928. Or, if you’re a Sox loyalist, a variety of blood pressure medications.

Also still to be introduced: The first working TV system. Trans-Atlantic flight. Mount Rushmore. And Pluto. Both the planet and the Walt Disney dog.

Eighty-six years. Everything in our world has changed.

But winning is still sweet.

Kalle Oakes is the Sun Journal’s columnist. His e-mail is koakes@sunjournal.com.