Sometime in the early 1980’s–’82 or ’83, I’d guess–we got cable TV and a whole new world came into our living room. This was before the advent of Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon, so instead of watching The Powerpuff Girls and Spongebob Squarepants, my brothers and I whiled away our afternoons with the likes of Beaver Cleaver and Sheriff Andy Taylor. As much as we learned to love those old shows, though, they were no match for the thing we discovered when summer arrived: Major League Baseball.

In those days, two standard channels in any basic cable package were WGN-TV from Chicago and Superstation WTBS from Atlanta. WGN broadcast Chicago Cubs games and TBS showed the Atlanta Braves, and between those two teams and our own Little League teams, our summers were filled with baseball. For one reason or another, we soon developed a preference for the Braves and by the end of that first cable-TV summer, we were diehard Braves fans.

Today’s Braves are a baseball dynasty with a record fourteen straight division titles, and over the past decade-and-a-half their roster has included any number of future Hall of Fame members. You don’t have to look far these days to find a Braves fan, and their popularity has spread so far that you can buy their team caps even way up here in northern Sweden. That wasn’t always the case, however, and it certainly wasn’t the case when I discovered them. In the ’80s they were bad. Really bad. My loyalty to them made me the laughingstock of my baseball-loving friends, but I didn’t care. Like I said, I was a diehard.

Things started looking up in the summer of 1991. After the team lost 97 games in 1990 (there are 162 games in the regular season), the stock of a Braves fan was at an all-time low. Though they started out uncharacteristically strong in 1991, nobody believed it would last. By mid- to late summer, diehards like me had begun daring to hope that the team might really go somewhere, but the majority of baseball fans continued to scoff. I remember checking the standings every day in the sports page and marveling at the way their record just got better and better. In the breakroom at work I would announce, almost incredulously, “The Braves are still in first place,” and my co-workers would laugh and mock me good-naturedly for my loyalty and excitement.

We know now that that “worst to first” season was the start of Atlanta Braves greatness. Since then, the team has finished first in their division every year and a lot of fans have become sort of blasé about it, but for me and many others that 1991 season was positively magical and each new division title holds a bit of that magic.

There is a downside, unfortunately. In all those years, the Braves have gone all the way only once, with only the 1995 World Series title to show for all those division titles. The team has become just as famous for choking in the post-season as for winning their division every year. It’s hard work sometimes being a Braves fan, getting your hopes built up season after season, only to have them dashed in the big games. The six-hour, eighteen-inning heartbreaker that was last night’s game took as much out of me as the season’s final Big Loss does every year. My brother, Bill, as much as he loves the Braves, has managed to resign himself to their losing in the post-season and focuses instead on the regular season. I can’t do that myself, and every year there’s a small but very real part of me that thinks that this will be the year. And because I’m a diehard, I’ve already started looking ahead to next season, thinking that with just a few minor adjustments they really could go all the way.