Long time coming

 Something happened yesterday on the first day of the baseball playoffs, but maybe you missed it in the midst of Aaron Rodgers snidely calling Travis Kelce "Mr. Pfizer" because he did a TV ad for the Covid-19 booster, or Trevor Bauer being martyr-ized  by misogynists and assorted other usual suspects.

(Another Blob for another day)

What happened was, the Minnesota Twins beat the Toronto Blue Jays 3-1 in Game 1 of their AL wild-card series.

A guy named Royce Lewis, once a No. 1 draft pick but lately just an unfortunate soul beset by injury, hit two home runs to power the win.

Starting pitcher Pablo Lopez took care of business on the mound with the help of four arms out of the pen.

And, oh, yeah: Under a gray lid of sky, a game that is its past once again got to wallow in it.

The Twins, after all, had lost a record 18 straight playoff games. 

It hadn't won a playoff game since 2004, when George W. Bush was president, and it hadn't won a home playoff game since 2002. Royce Lewis was 3 years old then. Lopez was 6. Jhoan Duran, who sealed the W with a hitless ninth out of the pen, was 4.

When Duran sent the last Blue Jay back to the dugout, it ended the longest playoff drought in North American professional sports. No team in any sport had lost 18 straight playoff games.

Baseball, as has been noted, eats this sort of thing for lunch and dinner. It's what makes the game unique, because no other American sport carries the weight of its history nor is more mindful of that weight. It's one of the reasons the game has struggled in the new millennium, because it spends so much time genuflecting to the past it often neglects its future, and even its present.

But it had its day yesterday, as the Twins had theirs. It even came dressed for the part.

Know what Pablo Lopez wore to the ballpark yesterday, for instance?

He wore the throwback jersey of his childhood hero, Johan Santana.

Who happened to be the last Twins pitcher to win a playoff game before Lopez ascended the bump yesterday, looking to lasso history on an overcast October day.

And all of baseball applauded.