Again. Again. Again.
Runners were abandoned. A base was forgotten. A manager's control was lost.
Get lathered, get rinsed, repeat.
In front of a stunned silent crowd at Dodger Stadium on Thursday night, the unthinkable became real, the impossible became the familiar, and history let out a blood-curdling scream.
For a third consecutive year, in a third consecutive playoff series, the Dodgers season didn't simply end, it dissolved. The Dodgers didn't just lose a deciding Game 5 of the National League division series to the New York Mets, they embarrassingly handed it to them.
The front office changes, the players change, yet the ugliness stays the same, 27 years without a World Series and counting, the doom enveloping more than 50,000 folks at Chavez Ravine on Thursday in a familiar throat tightening that now feels like suffocating.