Boston ? Locals questioned their guts because they were on a baseball field instead of a battlefield. Fans soured on them after their demands for more money held up a World Series game. And when the 1918 Boston Red Sox finally won the title, the feat was greeted with little more than mild enthusiasm.

The 1918 World Series was the last time the Red Sox brought championship glory to the city, but there were few echoes then of the cathartic joy that greeted Boston’s 2004 title.

Back then, World War I was consuming the country’s attention. The Red Sox weren’t the only game in town, competing for fan loyalty with the National League’s Boston Braves, as well as a legion of local minor league and amateur teams.

And the team’s success had spoiled fans. The 1918 title over the Chicago Cubs was the team’s fourth in seven years.

“(The attitude) was, ‘It’s another championship for our boys. That’s great. They’ll be back again,'” said Richard Johnson, curator of the Sports Museum of New England. “Little did they know it would be 86 years.”

The end of the drought came Wednesday when Boston completed a sweep of the St. Louis Cardinals, punctuating an improbable eight-game winning streak that started with the Red Sox down 0-3 to the New York Yankees.

The mayor of Boston in 1918 was Andrew Peters, a Brahmin who managed to interrupt the legendary tenure of James Michael Curley for four years. The city had more important things on its mind than baseball as its young men engaged in bloody battle overseas.

Major league baseball considered cancellation of the season, but Johnson said executives relented, thanks in part to the persuasion of much-maligned Red Sox owner Harry Frazee, who’s better known for selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees and starting the “Curse of the Bambino.”

With most young men off to war, many of those who were left behind to play baseball had physical ailments that prevented them from fighting. Either way, they were healthy enough to play a sport, and that caused resentment.

“It seemed inappropriate for able-bodied healthy young men to be taking part in any act that didn’t involve wearing a military uniform,” Johnson said.

Joe Dundon was a 12-year-old from East Boston when the Sox were making their last championship run. One of his first visits to Fenway Park was in 1915, when he saw Tris Speaker play. But a schedule of mid-afternoon games on weekdays made it hard for working people to make the games, meaning the crowd was largely “milkmen and gamblers,” the 98-year-old Dundon said with a laugh.

Some fans were galvanized after a threatened strike delayed Game 5, but not as the players would have hoped. Before the season, the owners cut the players’ World Series shares by almost half. Both the Cubs and the Red Sox decided they wanted a bigger piece of the pie.

The teams refused to take the field, leaving 24,694 fans waiting almost an hour while the players negotiated with the owners.

American League president Ban Johnson pulled out all the stops, including “crocodile tears,” according to Richard Johnson, to persuade them to take the field for good of the game and the country.

The fans greeted the teams with a vigorous booing, and only 15,238 turned out for the next and final game of the series.