During the first inning of Game 1 of the American League Division Series, aching tensions of Toronto Blue Jays fandom were at their most extreme.Mark Blinch/The Globe and Mail
So this is what it finally feels like, after those 22 lean and anonymous years – draining and disappointing.
Better bad feelings than no feelings at all. And we're only one tough, tortured game into what's bound to be a turbulent, ebb-and-flow experience, even if things end up going the way they did in 1992 and 1993, the way they're supposed to.
Now that the reset clock of the postseason has started its cruel ticking, we're all too ready and available for whatever moment-by-moment mood swing comes next. The rawest of human emotions are pent-up and overflowing at the same time. There's still, we hope, the lingering spirit of unfathomable joy carried over from the Blue Jays' glorious pennant drive. But now it's coupled with justifiable premonitions of anxiety for the unknowns and improbables that are de rigueur in the short-series playoff run.
To say nothing of the knowns, after a somewhat listless loss, and the diminished probabilities in this truncated best-of-five series.
The collective, contradictory feelings of fandom, suppressed almost into invisibility during all those lean, non-committal years that now seem like the distant past, are back on the boil. In Game 1, the beginning of the beginning, the awesome, aching tensions of fandom were at their most extreme. Millennials who were going through this for the first time joined forces with old hands who longed to reawaken their well-spent youth, and the result early on was mad, massive "Let's go Blue Jays" cheers for anything that moved – an outfield-sized Canadian flag being unfurled by members of the military, Cito Gaston preparing to throw out the first pitch, David Price getting his first called strike, Ben Revere stroking the first Blue Jay hit.
The fact that his lightly tapped, loudly hailed little single didn't come until the fourth inning, with the Jays down 2-0 due to Price's unexpected outbursts of strike-zone mortality, tells you everything about Game 1's emotional rise and fall. The subsequent walk to Josh Donaldson was greeted the way one of Donaldson's walk-off home runs were treated in the regular season, with a torrent of unstoppable home-team cheering and an "Ole, ole" chorus of victorious certainty.
Oh wait, that's "Jose, Jose" – more a rhythmic, love-the-sound-of-our-voices lineup chant than an aria of all-knowingness. Jose Bautista, waved on by 50,000 whirling white rally towels, grounds into a likely double play, Donaldson's high slide ensures this doesn't happen, and the closed-roof stadium, once a morgue, now a seismic zone, resonates with echoing cries of MVP. Living in the moment, we don't yet know that he's hurt himself in the process, that we're cheering a team-player act of self-sabotage. A sacrifice fly, routine in the regular season, becomes the cue for screams of triumph, proving our desperation. Even a runner dancing off third, upsetting Texas starter Yovani Gallardo's rhythm ever so slightly, drives large parts of the capacity crowd into paroxysms of ecstasy.
All that for a single run (in a game where both teams combined for only 11 hits). Which was followed by a two-run Texas home run at the top of the next inning, as if our reborn hopes were disproportionate and needed to be dampened. These were not the Blue Jays we know and love. Something about the cool weather, the closed dome, the heightened emotion, the date on the calendar altered the team of destiny's perfected course. Were these feared sluggers actually playing small ball, down three runs, trying to push a teammate station to station with a bunt? What is the postseason doing to us? This all feels so wrong.
It was at this low point that overexcited, but still hyperrational – or was it tragically inevitable? – Jays fans could let their distracted minds drift back to the fact that Price has never won a game in the postseason.
Small sample size, the thinking brain says. Look at the scoreboard, replies the frightened animal within us all. Bautista, tapping into the crowd's deep, dark emotional well, self-motivates with anger at a threatening curveball and responds with a home run. Flow, meet ebb: The Rangers respond in kind.
And then, indifferent to the Toronto crowd's tide-turning power, the game escaped our illusion of control and quietly subsided into the loss we never expected, but feared all the same. Greek tragedies looked a bit like this to the Athenians. You get your hopes too high; you think you knew how it would all turn out before the first pitch was thrown? We'll show you.
The Greeks claimed to like this powerful emotion, this beautiful expression of a universe beyond our control, even with the loss. The Greeks didn't know baseball.
But wait. The Blue Jays have their own resident Greek philosopher, the brilliant general manager Alex Anthopoulos, who constructed the team that delivered so much undeniable joy during the regular season.
"I'm trying to tell myself, 'You're powerless,'" he said earlier this week, before he'd had a chance to test theory against experience. "Try to enjoy it."
We're still trying. But after 22 empty years of silent stoicism, deferring to the cruel baseball gods, winning looks a lot more appealing. Bring on the blank slate.