So let’s hear it for the Last-tros, the Disast-ros, the team that lost more than 100 games a year between 2011 and 2013: the 2017 World Series champions. The sleeping giant has awakened; this is a team to be reckoned with.

I’ve been a baseball fan as long as I can remember. My earliest baseball memory was in October 1963, when as a 7 year old I cried like a baby when the Dodgers swept the Yankees in four straight to win the World Series. I picked a bad decade to be a Yankee fan. My hero was No. 7, the great Mickey Mantle, who was well past his prime and literally limping into retirement.

My best friend Clinton Branch was also a Mantle fan. I remember one time when we took Sharpies and turned our white T-shirts into No. 7 pinstriped Yankees jerseys. If that didn’t invite enough ridicule, we then had a two-person parade around the neighborhood for all to see. And we wonder why we were bullied. Back then out-of-market televised baseball was NBC’s Game of the Week on Saturday afternoons with Curt Gowdy and Joe Garagiola. Once the hapless Yankees were actually on and I got to watch them. I remember Clinton blamed me because Mantle homered last time he saw them on TV, but this time his only hit “was a stupid drag bunt.”

I kept the faith with the Yankees through the 1970s, but things started to change with the advent of big-money baseball and George Steinbrenner. I was a traditionalist, and all the change was a little much to handle. Then on Aug. 2, 1979, my last Yankee hero, catcher Thurman Munson, died in a plane crash. I was done. I had nothing left in the tank for the Yankees.

By that time I was living in the Houston area and the Astros were my “National League team.” The succeeded the Mets as the chronic underachievers, playing in, once the Louisiana Superdome was built, what was dubbed “the World’s Smallest Domed Stadium.” But I have good baseball memories from my Houston years, from buying seats in left field for the expressed purpose of heckling inept leftfielder Cliff Johnson, to being there at the stadium on that July night in 1976 when Larry Dierker pitched a no-hitter.

Another special memory was the 1980 season when the Astros won the Western Division and played the Phillies to see who would go to the World Series. I got tickets to the deciding Game 5 and was ready to witness history being made. Nolan Ryan was on the mound. All was right with the world. Houston took a 1-0 lead in the first, but Philadelphia came back with 2 in the second. The Astros tied it in the sixth, then opened up a 5-2 lead in the bottom of the seventh. Just six more outs to go. But the Phillies weren’t finished. Five runs in the top of the eighth to take a 7-5 lead. But wait! Two runs for the Astros in the bottom of the eighth to tie it 7-7. Beer sales were cut off, but there was still pressure-packed baseball to be played. No runs in the ninth, so it was on to extra innings. In the 10th, Del Unser and Garry Maddox both doubled for the Phillies. The Astros were retired in the bottom of the 10th, and the Phillies won their first pennant in 30 years.

It was another 25 years until the Astros made it to the World Series, and 12 years after that until they won it all, in a series much like the Game 5 that I saw in the Astrodome 37 years ago: no lead was ever safe. Even the 5-0 lead in Game 7 in LA wasn’t good enough. We’d seen leads on both sides evapaorate with one swing of the bat multiple times in this series. It was all about the countdown to 27 outs. No rest until then.

Was it “one for the ages”? Not if you’re a fan of excellent pitching. But is was one to relive over and over through a long cold winter, until next March when teams load up and head to Florida and Arizona to start the process again.