This could be the year that the Milwaukee Brewers finally win it all. I am writing this a couple days ahead of the outcome. I may come out and edit this before it posts if something drastically changes but this is not really a story about the the Brewers being champions. It is about the journey to get here.

The pillow in the picture was made for me by my wife and at that time, we were both teenagers. I have kept it around all these years not because I am a huge Brewer’s fan but because she made it. The funny thing is I would be shocked if she did this today. There is hardly a domestic bone in her body. In fact, we joke that the sewing machine I claimed out of her parent’s estate is my sewing machine.

Being a Brewer’s fan has had it’s ups and downs. Mostly downs if I am to be honest. There are a couple of reasons that I don’t follow them too closely. One of them being that it is nearly a miracle that they are ever on TV. Unlike the Seattle Mariners, you can find those games on the radio in most markets here even if they are not on TV. Mostly, I just check in every couple of months to see if they are trending up or down. It is kind of like your 401K.

Last year, I was really hoping for a Seattle vs. Milwaukee World Series. Two teams that have never one one. Unfortunately, both teams had the same results, a series loss to the eventual series contenders. After having the best record in MLB and getting swept by the Dodgers I didn’t hold much hope that the Brewers were going to be contenders. In fact, the year before they got beat in the Wild Card series by the Mets after winning the NL Central. They have had kind of a recent history of choking when it counts.

There are some things about me that apparently my kids don’t even know. We were sitting around grieving after Raya died and talking about how we watched the game when my son said “where did this obsession for the Brewers even come from? It seems kind of random.” To be fair, I had never really ever talked with him about it.

When my dad was midway into his career, the company used to staff projects with people from different offices. At that time, they offered to provide weekly travel or long term lodging. My mom wanted to see places and so we went to Milwaukee for a few months. We lived in a town house and I started Kindergarten. One of the things I got to do was go to a Milwaukee Brewers game with my dad. That became my team.

If I do my math correctly, the year was 1979. I spent the fall in the Milwaukee school district. A couple of years later, the Brewers faced the St Loius Cardinals in the 1982 World Series. I was a kid, what did I know? I didn’t know that this was a small market team that didn’t have the staying power to not get back until 44 years later. It was my first real sport’s loss too.

One of the things I got when I went to the game was a Milwaukee Brewers hat. I still have it, but it looks 47 years old. I consider it retired now but I broke it out for the games. In this age of new uniforms every game a.k.a. purple and black Oregon Duck uniforms it is common to have alternate logos and colors. But when they announced a new, all blue hat instead of the yellow on blue, I decided to get one. I was in high school.

Moving on from high school to college, I took my Brewers hat as a badge of pride. You saw Dodgers, Angels, Giants, Yankees, Red Sox, White Sox and even some Athletics hats but never a Milwaukee hat. It didn’t matter if they were not contenders, the fact that it wasn’t popular was good enough for me.

When I moved into my dorm of 75 kids all of the sudden, there were two other guys wearing Milwaukee Brewers hats there. What are the odds? They were Brewers fans because brewers made beer and that was an extremely important profession particularly on Friday and Saturday night. But still, I found my people. Not only were they Brewers fans but also Raiders fans.

One particular drinking game that I liked to play is called “Asshole“. Our version included the Asshole having to use the term “Brew Crew Rules” before playing a card. With three out of seven being Brewers fans, we had a distinct advantage. That was thirty years ago, maybe it will finally be true.

End Your Programming Routine: I now have a slightly newer Brewers hat that is the original blue and gold. My brother bought it for me about twenty years ago when Nike was offloading baseball hats. Of course nobody was buying Milwaukee so there was ten of those to any other team. There would be a pile of Milwaukee hats, some Cleveland or Detroit hats and then some Montreal Expos or something. Winning a world series won’t change my world but it sure is nice to see two teams that are not there every couple of years.