With apologies to Charles Dickens, it was the worst of times, it remains the worst of times, it was the age of foolishness, now the age of flibbertigibbety, it was the epoch of sabermetric disbelief, still the epoch of FIP disdain passed from the father to the son, it was the spring of hope, it is the abbreviated summer of game-by-game despair.
It feels like one continuous thread, a Cincinnati version of string theory that has remained unbroken from the moment Mat Latos trudged unheroically off the mound in the fifth inning of Game 5 nearly 8 years ago until this moment.