The 2018 Atlanta Braves will be playing in the postseason. It’s been a few days since they clinched with a 5-3 victory over the Philadelphia Phillies, and it’s still thrilling to type (and read) those words. This is what they played for. This is what we watched for. It’s not the apotheosis for the franchise as a whole, but it’s apotheosis enough for those of us that watched nearly every game with some combination of patience and gallows humor for the past three years — finally emerging from the rebuilding cellar, and not just as a crawl, but at a headlong dash-that-was-sometimes-a-tumble-and-sometimes-a-brilliant-sprint.
The playoffs are dumb, the playoffs are great
