2025.

These Toronto Blue Jays meant something.

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Image via the Toronto Blue Jays/@BlueJays

So… yeah. I was maybe not quite hoping for that weird.

Not that anybody needs a recap at this point, but I suppose it must be said here that the Toronto Blue Jays did not win the World Series this season, despite their fans, their city, their country, the Los Angeles Dodgers, and the very concept of baseball itself absolutely begging them to do it, again and again, until far beyond the point that any reasonable assessment would have said that the damn thing should have long been over and celebrations underway that would have still been ongoing here days later as I write this.

The Baseball Gods teased us in Game Three, then taunted us at the end of Game Six. In Game Seven they simply shoved us in the mud.

FUCK.

But, again, nobody needs me to remind them of any of this. And, really, what does anybody need here? What do I need?

From that season I think we got pretty much everything we could have needed, save for that last so small yet so unbelievably big step. Save for any one of what felt like fourteen mini-catastrophes—any single fucking one of fourteen coin flips—going the Blue Jays’ way and giving the season and that brilliant team the ending it deserved. Alas, the Dodgers ran the table.

I’m just pulling a number out of thin air there, and perhaps I should know better in the wake of all that. The devil is in the details, after all. But you know what I mean.

No, we didn’t get our hands on the trophy, the parade, or the joyous crush of bodies in the streets at the very end, but we got a hell of an unforgettable experience. The best one in more than 30 years. And we didn’t just get to do it with fellow Jays fans, but with most of the baseball world in our corner, and the country in our corner. I got calls from friends I rarely get to talk to, extra texts and DMs from people I love. I watched games and talked ball with friends who wouldn’t normally even give the TV a glance if a game was on. I got to wear a vintage Jays jacket, which I’m usually too embarrassed to put on by the time the temperature is right for it, for a whole month!

There were no fustian Atkins press conferences adding insult to injury as other teams played on. No one more game they could have pushed it to. They made it to the top of the mountain, as far as I’m concerned. They just weren’t the ones who got to plant the flag.

It’s corny, I know. Is it loser talk? Maybe. Probably. Necessarily, I suppose. But what am I gonna do, be mad at the team playing in the eleventh inning of the seventh game of the World Series for doing baseball wrong?? Become enraged at the suggestion that they deserve a parade anyway?¹ Brother, life is way too fucking short for that.

Besides, immortality tends to find a way—just ask José Bautista. Looking up at the flag at Rogers Centre that will soon commemorate their American League championship will forever be bittersweet, of course. But that means we’ll be able to look up and forever know what this team was, too. You hate to be remembered as the ones that didn’t win or, worse, the ones that should have won but couldn’t get out of their own way. But no one who was there will ever think the Dodgers should party too hard over that, or that the Blue Jays can’t hold their heads incredibly high.

True, memories fade when something more powerful comes along to replace them—we don’t really need to think about the Jays’ 1991 team anymore, do we?²—and this incredible group and the unbelievable journey they’ve just brought us on will one day suffer the same inevitable fate. But keep in mind that the concept cuts both ways.

To think of where the Blue Jays are right now compared to where they were a year ago? Compared to where they were when they failed to extend Vladdy before his self-imposed deadline last spring? Compared to where they were when Bo was a question mark and they couldn’t develop pitching? Compared to when Vlad had never done it when it mattered? Compared to when rage-baiting, click-farming dickhead clowns could suckle all the meat-head juice they could dream of just by pointing out that the team hadn’t won a playoff game since 2016?

Compared to where they were when it seemed like big ticket, big money players didn’t want to—maybe wouldn’t ever want to—be a part of this?

Those memories have been blasted so far into irrelevance so quickly we can hardly see them anymore. (Shane Bieber, it was reported on Tuesday night, has decided to opt into the final year of his contract, forgoing a $4 million buyout and taking a $16 million salary, meaning he’ll effectively cost the Jays just $12 million next season. Millions, if not tens of millions, left on the table just to be here.)

Opportunities like the one the Jays earned over these last incredible weeks are so rare, especially around here, and that’s obviously why this stings so badly now and undoubtedly will for a long time. But, regardless of the outcome, a ride like this one is incomprehensibly rare in its own right. As is a season that has completely changed the mood of this franchise. Changed the image, changed the trajectory. A season that has completely changed what is possible.

Would I have preferred a win? Yeah, obviously. Would I do it all again the exact same way? Yes. A thousand times yes.

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1. There was a parade in Amsterdam after the Dutch lost the 2010 World Cup final to Spain in extra time and, as far as I can tell, the world did not end. Chill out, dingus.

2. Hey, so… um… speaking of 1991, I can’t help but feel like I should point out here that I thought it was so incredibly strange that the Jays organization basically didn’t put in a wrong foot throughout the entire playoffs—assuming, that is, that the Pharrell and Jonas Brothers decisions had to have come from MLB/FOX—then trotted out Jack Morris to throw out the first pitch in Game Seven when Paul Molitor was already there to do the same thing.

Jack Morris! Jack 7.43-ERA-in-the-’92-playoffs Morris! Jack suspended-for-racist-remarks-about-Ohtani Morris! I’m not superstitious but if I was that would have felt like absolute karmic poison to me. WTF?