After the Buffalo Bills somehow made the playoffs on the last day of the 2017 NFL season, the dubious distinction of longest playoff drought in American professional sports fell to my beloved Seattle Mariners. In 2001, they set the record for wins by a Major League Baseball team in a season. Like all record-setters for wins in their respective sports, they went on to fail to win the championship. They haven’t been back to the playoffs since.

In 2001, the World Series droughts were intact for the Red Sox, White Sox, Cubs, and Astros. Ichiro was a rookie. I was in college. 9/11 had just happened. W Bush had been President for less than a year. The Apprentice was more than two years away from debuting on television. Obama wouldn’t be a Senator till a year after that.

Point is, it’s been a while.

Put another way, the Las Vegas Golden Knights have been a team for 226 days and are about to play in their first NHL Championship Series. The Seattle Mariners have been a team for over 41 years (15,022 days) and have yet to reach a World Series. I’ve only been alive for 38 of those years and only a Mariners fan, really, for 26 of them. During those 26 years, the Rockies, Diamondbacks, Marlins, and Rays were all created and all went on to play in a combined 5 World Series, winning 3 of them, including in that fated year of 2001, with Mariner Hall of Famer Randy Johnson named co-MVP.

I’ve been over the ground before of how silly (but fun) sports are and, by extension, how useless it is that I spend so much energy on such a particularly futile team. But those posts were written when other teams were mathematically worse at not making the playoffs, even (in the first instance), another baseball team. The failure of the Mariners had not been quite so spectacular.

And then, of course, there was this year. The Mariners have been off to one of their hottest starts since 2001, comparable with the 2002 and 2003 seasons which both saw 93 wins and missing the playoffs (the last time a team won that many games and missed the playoffs was in 2005, when Cleveland matched the dubious feat with 93 wins; in 2003, the Marlins made the playoffs with 2 fewer wins and won the World Series). Perennial all-star Robinson Cano was hitting over .300, along with relative newcomers Dee Gordon Jean Segura, and Mitch Haniger. James Paxton, finally healthy after years of potential peeking through injury-shortened seasons, was lights-out, stringing together 16-strikeout starts and a no-hitter. Edwin Diaz shed his reputation as a shaky closer to lead the AL in saves, most of them without a baserunner. Everything was coming together.

Then, it all seemed to fall apart. Cano, clubhouse rock and role model, future Hall of Famer, was hit by a pitch and broke his hand, losing 4-6 weeks of his season on May 13, 2018. The Mariners were 22-17, just shy of a playoff spot. Two days later as the M’s reeled from the loss, Cano was officially suspended 80 games for violating baseball’s performance-enhancing drugs policy. Half a season. Just like that, Cano’s chance at the HoF looked as unlikely as the M’s chance at breaking this 16-year playoff drought. How can you lose your #3 hitter and Gold Glove second baseman for functionally the season and hope to compete?

Following the suspension, the Mariners promptly dropped back-to-back games for the first time since late April. But then they won four straight, culminating with tonight’s 3-2 10-inning win, their second straight extra-inning comeback 3-2 win. The M’s are now 6-2 without Cano, climbing to 28-19 overall and, more importantly, hold a playoff position by 2.5 games over the collapsing Angels. They’re two games out of first and on pace to win 97 games.

Admittedly, there was trouble on the horizon today for the other .300 hitters in the lineup. Gordon went on the 10-day DL today with a broken toe he’s been nursing. Haniger left the game after being hit by a pitch. And Segura jostled his shoulder sliding in to score the winning run in the top of the 10th, almost not making it back out to shortstop for the bottom of the frame. It looks like a realistic possibility that all four .300+ Mariners will be sidelined tomorrow (it turns out that Cano was actually down to .287 by the time he got hurt, but he’s a career .304 batter with 2,417 hits, so…).

Assuming the 2018 Mariners aren’t about to all spontaneously drop from injuries, though, the Cano setback looks like it might just be recoverable. Granted that the M’s haven’t been playing the most spectacular competition in the last few days, but they also haven’t been playing the dregs. Games with the Red Sox, Yankees, Astros, and Angels will continue to be challenging. But the rest of the AL field is manageable this year and the Angels are quickly trying to absent themselves from the conversation after losing six of their last seven. And, of course, it’s early. We’re only about halfway to the All-Star Break. There’s plenty of time for collapse. Plenty of room for heartache and loss. It is, after all, the Seattle Mariners.

Then again, on May 22, 2018, the Mariners were 32-12. And they finished that year 70 games above .500. Seventy games!

There’s reason to believe. There’s always reason to believe; it’s baseball. But there’s perhaps extra reason to believe this year, with both Edgar and Ichiro in the dugout helping our .300 hitters improve. Nelson Cruz has been on a cold streak lately, battling injuries and a power outage, and yet still we’re contending. New Mariner Ryon Healy has shaken off a bad start to find his stroke. Felix is hanging on despite some signs of age and wear. The back of the rotation and most of the bullpen have performed surprisingly well. Even our spot starter AAA call-ups like Christian Bergman are throwing six-inning shutouts before leaving the game to head straight back to Tacoma.

Where will we be when Cano comes back in August? And where will his head be, knowing he’s trying to help drive the team to a playoffs he’s suspended from partaking in? Maybe he can ask his old friend and fellow ex-corrupt-Yankee Alex Rodriguez. It’s hard not to see all this as just yet another way the Yankees, who knocked us out in 2001 and traded for Ichiro and are the Yankees, are getting one over on us. Here, take our PED-riddled superstar, we don’t want him.

But the larger point is that it might not matter what the rest of Cano’s career looks like in Seattle. Because, like the 2001 Mariners who kept shedding stars (RJ in ’98, Griffey in ’99, and ARod in ’00) and getting better each year, we might not need this particular would-be Hall of Famer to get where we want to go. We might be better off with humbler, scrappier sorts who can piece together no-hitters and extra-inning comebacks.

Twenty-eight wins in the bank. Last year, we were 28-30 when we reached this mark. I’ll take 28-19 for today.