Is this the year the Boston Red Sox finally end their 85-year-old quest for a world championship? The team’s Lawrence followers can only wonder.

Longtime Red Sox fan Steve Metzler thought that time had come in 1986 when his team needed only one more victory to win the World Series against the New York Mets.

“My wife (Patty) and I were watching Game 6 and we even got the kids up out of bed to watch the end because we wanted them to see the Red Sox win,” said Metzler, 52, a Lawrence resident who was living in the Northeast at the time.

Then Red Sox first baseman Bill Buckner ruined the Metzlers’ and countless other Red Sox fans’ night when he let a ground ball go between his legs, allowing the Mets to score and win the game in the bottom of the 10th inning. The Mets went on to win Game 7 and the Series.

“It’s been frustrating,” Metzler said, summing up his life as a Red Sox fan.

“Thank God I don’t have to remember that,” said Nick Kallail, 22, also a Lawrence resident and a marketing assistant with the Kansas University athletic department.

Kallail first became a Red Sox fan in 1987 when he was 6 years old. His family had a summer home on Cape Cod.

“I’m not really sure how it started — my family is all Yankee fans,” Kallail said.

Neither Kallail nor Metzler believes in the so-called “Curse of the Bambino.” Legend has it that the Red Sox have been cursed since the team sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1920, two years after the Red Sox won their last World Series. The Yankees, of course, have won 26 World Series, and now the two teams are clashing for the American League pennant.

“The players today don’t have a sense of history,” Metzler said.

If the Red Sox get past the Yankees, Metzler said Boston would have a better chance of beating the Florida Marlins in the World Series.

Kallail wants to see the Red Sox match up in the fall classic against the Chicago Cubs. The two teams of hard-luck losers would be playing for baseball’s biggest prize.

“That,” Kallail said, “would be beautiful.”