Why did Jake Bauers have to get my hopes up?

Last week was…less than fun. If we want to go back to Saturday, it started with the Badgers 38-21 loss to USC. And while any expectations I had for the football team had largely been erased after their performance over the first three weeks, their opening half against the Trojans brought me more hope than it probably should have. The 21-10 start certainly looked to be more of a fluke than any indication of improvement, as Wisconsin went on to get thrashed 280 in the second half, a thoroughly unenjoyable viewing experience. Follow that up with a Packer game with the exact opposite problem; an unbearable first half followed up with a comeback in the second only to have our hopes dashed by annoyingly undefeated Vikings. Toss onto the pile that I was pretty under the weather all week and things were rather miserable.

But to top it all off was the Milwaukee Brewers. Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on you. Fool me for every postseason appearance since 2018 and I think you can just medically diagnose me as insane for believing that the Brewers are ever going to get out of the wild card round in the future.

I tried to go into the series with the Mets with low expectations. While this season’s iteration of the Brewers had exceeded what many had anticipated from them, including myself, last year’s sad showing against the Diamondbacks was still front of mind heading into the three game series.

Still…there was enough going for us that I allowed myself more hope than was perhaps warranted. We had just won two out of three games against New York when we had nothing to play for and they had everything on the line and they would be coming off a tough stretch where they had to fly from Milwaukee on Sunday to play two games in Atlanta on Monday only to fly back to Milwaukee for the first game on Tuesday.

It didn’t take long into the first game for my expectations to drop back to where they likely should have been. While we got off to a hot start in the first inning, the Mets took the lead in the next frame. The Brewers surprisingly answered in the fourth, actually retaking the lead, but then our bullpen instantly imploded, allowing four runs in the fifth, all with two outs. Game over.

Same story the next night. An early home run from Jackson Chourio tied the game at 1-1, but then the Mets instantly answered the next inning, a familiar tale that I had already seen the ending to. While we were able to score a run in the fifth, the one-run lead New York had seemed insurmountable. Still, the pitching kept us in the game and that was when Chourio re-entered the scene. An eighth-inning blast tied the game and Garrett Mitchell launched a two-run home run four at-bats later that felt like a turning point in the series.

I foolishly let the hype of the win cloud my vision; I was starting to actually contemplate the possibility of us moving on to the next round. After being starved of a postseason win for years, despite making it to October more often in the past six years than in the entire history of the Brewers, the Wednesday night rally was like a puddle in the desert; I hungrily drank it all down and then was for some reason surprised when I still found myself surrounded by nothing but sand after it was gone.

But Game 3 was worse than that. It was like drinking up that puddle and then seeing a helicopter flying towards you to rescue you, dropping down a ladder for you to climb up, and then the pilot pulling it away at the last second, drinking an ice cold bottled water and laughing as he flew away and leaving you stranded.

Pete Alonso was the pilot of that stupid helicopter on Thursday night, Jesse Winker his annoying co-pilot, and the Brewers had the most soul-crushing playoff loss in baseball since…well, since the Brewers’ 2019 wildcard game against the Nationals. The recent playoff exits against Los Angeles, Atlanta and Arizona were disappointing, but at no point did it ever really feel like we ever really had a chance in those games. The pitching gave up early leads and the offense never showed up.

But this year…this year it felt like we might actually have a chance to break from the norm that had been established. The clutch home runs from Jake Bauers and Sal Frelick looked like they had broken the curse of non-clutch hitting and Tobias Myers and the bullpen had held the Mets scoreless for eight innings. Two outs away from breaking out of the mold. Instead, just sand.

After the loss, I debated tossing all my Wisconsin related gear into the nearest landfill and then moving to Mongolia where I would never hear the word “baseball” again. But then I finally started to get over my cold, the Badgers smoked Purdue and the Packers somehow held on to win. There’s usually a light at the end of the tunnel. Until next year, Brew Crew.

A C ERTAIN POINT OF V IEW

BY

NATHANIEL U NDERWOOD REPORTER