Keeping My Fingers Crossed

I probably shouldn't mention this, for fear of jinxing them (I'm not superstitious about anything but baseball), but my team, the Atlanta Braves, is on a little bit of a roll. Over the weekend they took three out of four games from the Dodgers, who have the best record in the National League. The Braves might be a bit too far back to catch the Phillies in their division, but the wild card is now tantalizingly close, though they still trail four other teams for that playoff slot. After a lackluster first half of the season, the team seems to be playing with some confidence and seem poised to make a big push. Even if they fall short this year, the recent improvement, along with the likely arrival of phenom Jason Heyward next year, makes them look like they could be contenders for the next several years. Here's an interesting point to ponder: even though the Braves enjoyed unprecedented success through the nineties and even the first half of the 2000s, why does a longtime fan like me tend to remember the wilderness years before that? It's certainly gratifying to see them on an upswing, rather than plummeting to the depths they suffered in the late seventies and late eighties after brief periods of contention. It feels good to look forward with some optimism, even if in the grand scheme of things I know its pretty inconsequential.