October's heart tug

 October rolled in this week with its usual warm days and cool nights, and baseball greeted it in its usual way, too. Combed its hair. Put on a tie. Stood up straight, and reminded us once more why it can sometimes be the best of our games, even if these days its audience is mostly in its dotage.

But we're four days deep in playoff baseball now, and look what the game is up to. The Brewers, Astros and Orioles are gone; the Mets, Tigers and Royals still breathe. That's two division champs and a 91-win wild-card team erased before the first week of October was out.

And the survivors?

Well, the Mets had to play a doubleheader on Monday just to get into the show. The Tigers were deader than Ty Cobb as late as August 10, when they began a remarkable surge that has carried over into October. And the Royals are just a summer removed from losing 106 games and finishing dead last in the 2023 AL Central race.

In one short summer, though -- in one short series -- stuff can happen. And does. And it's why the National Pastime can devolve into the National Afterthought, and still reel us in when time and circumstance are right.

I was reminded of this last week, when my wife and I were north of the border. We spent a few days in Montreal and a few days in Quebec City, where everywhere you looked the foliage was already ablaze with the reds and oranges and rust-browns of autumn. And where something else was everywhere you looked.

Montreal Expos gear, to be precise. Racks and racks of shirts and hats and sweatshirts, as if the 'Spos were still a going concern and not a memory that's now ...

How long since they left for D.C. again? Twenty years, right?

Twenty years. Twenty years since the Montreal Expos became the Washington Nationals, betrayed first by carpetbagging owner Jeffrey Loria and then by Major League Baseball itself. 

And yet Expos gear is still everywhere in the shops of Montreal and Quebec City. It still moves. The citizenry still wears it. It's as conspicuous by its presence as Washington Nationals gear is conspicuous by its relative absence.

You can take that to mean Canadians are still torqued at getting rogered by the damn Americans again, or you can simply take it to mean nostalgia is a big seller north of the border. Alongside the Expos gear, after all, there's a fair stash of Quebec Nordiques gear. And the Nordiques have been the Colorado Avalanche since 1995.

So, yeah. They hold fast to their memories in the True North.

For me, though, in this first week of playoff baseball, it's just one more reminder of the strange hold the game has on those who have fallen under its spell. Even in obvious eclipse, it tugs at the heart.

Especially in October. Especially when the days turn warm and golden, and the nights turn cool.