Estimated Reading Time: 2 Minutes

“Every day is a new opportunity. You can build on yesterday’s success or put its failures behind and start over again. That’s the way life is, with a new game every day, and that’s the way baseball is.”

– Bob Feller, Hall of Fame Pitcher

As the sun sets over Houston, Texas, two teams from Major League Baseball will be playing the final game of the 2019 season. Twenty-five men on each side, collectively lacing up their cleats, buttoning their uniforms, grabbing their gloves and playing our national pastime before packing it up for the season.

A Houston sunset goes perfectly with the Astros orange and blue. Perhaps that’s why they’ve been so dominant this season. Each time their opponent faces off against them, the sun is already setting on the chances to beat Houston. They are stifling. They are the incoming darkness, expanding across the playing field, devouring everything in their path.

The Astros after the sun has set, are a different beast entirely. They have been to the mountaintop before, and there is no reason they shouldn’t be able to plant their flag once more.

The only thing standing in their way is a pitching machine with two different eye colors.

Fourteen-hundred miles away, the District of Columbia will watch with bated breath.

In my many travels across the country, I have always found a Washington, D.C. sunset to be filled with tranquility, reflection, and peace. There’s something about that orange glow lighting up the monuments and buildings of our nation’s capital. It’s a gentle glow, one that washes over you with warmth and respect. It’s a quiet humility that fills my heart during a Washington sunset. Each D.C. sunset always leaves me thankful for the places I have been and hopeful of the places I will be.

And the Nationals know exactly where they’ve been.

As Joe Buck has told us around a billion times in the last week, the Nationals have been the underdogs at every turn this year. Down 12 games under .500? Check. Lose your franchise superstar? Check. Defeat the Brewers in the one-game Wild Card playoff? Check. Take the Dodgers, the best team in the National League, to 5 games and win the damn thing late in Game 5? Check.

The 2019 Washington Nationals were born into the darkness, and are one step away from stepping fully into the light for the first time in franchise history.

The last game of the 2019 MLB Season is here. Today is the last day of the season. The sun has set on another wonderful season in the sun, another exploration into 162 games of the gargantuan and the minutia of the game we call baseball.

Tomorrow will be cold and gray, but today… we have baseball.