RALEIGH - Massachusetts transplant Mishelle Smith sobbed with joy as she called her sister back home the night the Boston Red Sox clinched the 2004 World Series.

It wasn't quite the way she had envisioned celebrating her beloved team's first championship in 86 years, seated alone in a half-empty Raleigh sports bar where you needed to ask the bartender to switch the channel to the deciding baseball game.

Three years later, the mounting momentum of Red Sox Nation's sprawl southward and the improved ability to link socially online has ensured the former UNC grad student no longer has to watch another Red Sox playoff series alone.

During Boston's 2-1 win over the Colorado Rockies in the second game of the World Series on Thursday night, Smith floated from table to crowded table at Raleigh's Fox and Hound Pub proudly showing off her new Triangle Red Sox Nation T-shirt.

The back of the T-shirt read, "Northern Attitude, Southern Hospitality," and many of the 60-plus Boston fans there wore shirts with the same slogan, along with blue, red and even tie-dyed Red Sox caps. The previous night, more than 100 fans and registered members of the Triangle Red Sox Nation group, created online 2 1/2 years ago on Meetup.com, crowded the same space for Game 1.

"This, to me, is a dream come true," said Smith, 27, a Starbucks manager. "It's like an extended family."

Growing membership

At 601 and growing, Meetup.com's Triangle Red Sox Nation group ranks second in membership only to Meetup's Boston Red Sox group in the belly of the enemy, New York City.

Many of the Triangle group's membership count themselves as New England transplants. Just between 2000 and 2005, according to IRS tax returns, 4,179 people have moved from the Boston area to Wake, Durham and Orange counties.

Bryan Richardson, a Raleigh financial planner who grew up in New Hampshire, started the Triangle Red Sox Nation group with a Durham colleague who also was eager to meet other Red Sox fans in the area.

"Two and a half years ago, if we got 10 people together, we were impressed," said Richardson, 32.

Some Rockies fans have had less success hooking up for games so far. Duke women's basketball players Abby Waner and her sister Emily grew up in Highlands Ranch, Colo., and have yet to find a pocket of Rockies fans locally.

"There's a lot of people around here who told me they'd help me cheer for the Rockies, because they hate the Red Sox," said Abby Waner, who inherited her dislike of Boston from her father, a former minor leaguer in the New York Yankees' farm system.

The Triangle Red Sox Nation group organized bar gatherings for more than 50 games this season, along with a charity golf tournament to raise money for The Jimmy Fund, which supports research at Boston's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

The group's T-shirts, complete with a triangleredsoxnation.com Web address, have helped spread word of mouth, said Sean G. Bunn, another Massachusetts transplant and organizer for the group. Folding stacks of the group's T-shirts for sale on a Fox and Hound pool table, Bunn said other forces might be at play, also.

"Everybody loves a winner," Bunn said.

(Staff writer Rachel Carter and staff researcher David Raynor contributed to this report.)