Is ending the streak a cursed blessing, or a blessed curse?

At long last the question has been asked and answered: Is 2016 the year that the Cubs break the curse and win the World Series?

And because it’s November 3 and the World Series is over, you know the answer to the question.

But I am writing this on October 25, and the Cubs haven’t yet played the first game of this World Series. So the answer is still a mystery to me, for now.

Of course, you couldn’t really call it a true “world” series the last time the Cubs won it all way back in 1908, because major league baseball back then only included teams from the United States. But once global warming finally melted enough ice to let the Montreal Expos paddle their canoes across the border in the late ‘60s, the title was truly one for the world.

Later, the Toronto Blue Jays also paddled across to join the party. Unlike the Expos, they brought bats and gloves with them, which helped them to actually win the World Series in 1992 and 1993.

But the Cubs? They have been shut out of the title since 1908, thanks to a Greek who put a curse on the team when his goat wasn’t allowed to attend a game. Since then, Greeks and goats have been banned from Chicago, but it hasn’t helped.

Lately the Cubs have come close, though. They were favored to win it all in 2015, guaranteed the title in the movie “Back To the Future, Part II.”

But the real-life non-movie Cubs missed their chance and fell a bit short, probably because nobody in this country can read Roman numerals any more — just one more indictment of our American educational system. I blame Canada, with their oh-so-sensible metric system, and their brutal polar vortex wind that comes roaring down Lake Michigan with no other purpose than to make Chicago’s painful off-season seem to last forever. We should build a wall.

Embarrassed by their 2015 failure, the Cubs came back energized and ended this season with the best record in baseball, clinching their division by XII games or so.

And then they beat the Giants in IV games.

And then the Dodgers in VI.

And then they were in the MMXVI World Series, hoping to win it all for the first time in forever. Nobody on the planet today was alive the last time the Cubs were champs.

And yet for me today — on the morning before the Cubs play the first game of the 2016 World Series — as a lifelong Cubs fan I have to admit that I have mixed feelings about the whole thing.

I mean, sure, as a kid I always dreamed of watching my Cubs win it all, dreamed of the ticker-tape parade down Michigan Avenue, dreamed of wearing my Cubby-blue hat and shirt to school to shame my black-and-white Sox loser classmates. What north-sider kid wouldn’t want that to happen?

But as fifty years of failure became sixty, then seventy, then eighty years, things started to change. Could the Cubs make it to a century as lovable losers? You almost relished the thought.

And then when a century passed, you wondered how much longer they could keep this up.

How many balls could skip miraculously between the first-baseman’s legs at the most disastrous time?

How many fans could break up a game-ending play by knocking down a catchable ball down the third-base line?

What would it be this year to doom the Cubs — a wayward pigeon being whacked by a drive deep in left field, turning a game-winning grand slam into a bloody-but-catchable season-ending fly ball?

It became a record bigger than baseball, a drama beyond all other dramas testing how long and in how many ways the Cubs could continue a legacy of failure so monumental that no single human life could ever encompass it.

And, although I hate to admit it, this lifelong Cubs fan can’t help but mourn the loss that would come with a win. It would be like owning the ugliest dog in the world, then coming home to find out that your wife took it to the vet and had its crooked tail straightened.

I’ll never live long enough to see any other Chicago team I love beat the ugly record it took the Cubs more than a century to achieve. Not the Blackhawks, not the Bulls, not the Fire. Sure, the Bears are making a run at it, but I don’t think I’ll make it to 2093 to see them eclipse the Cubs as the greatest losers of all time, because Jay Cutler will probably be traded before then and the Bears will start winning again.

Anyway, you (oh people of the future) already know how it all came out.

Me? I’m still way back here in October, watching the leaves fall and waiting to know if the longest losing streak in sports history is coming to an end — or not.

If the Cubs found a way to choke again this year against the Indians from the Land of Cleve (who, at 70 years without a title, are one of the few teams with a chance to beat the Cubs’ monumental-loser record sometime in the next lifetime) I’ll spend the winter wearing my Cubby-blue hat, telling haters: “Yeah, well, wait until next year.”

And I’ll cheer for the Cubs to win it all and finally put an end to the curse, as I have done every year since Ernie Banks was a skinny rookie kid.

But I’ll still have that place deep in my heart that is waiting for a goat, a pigeon — anything — to come along and keep my beloved Cubs special just a little bit longer.

Anyway, I wonder how it all came out.

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