This post, I fear, will offer little solace to all those Washington Nationals fans currently reeling after the club’s crushing and epically odd loss to the Chicago Cubs in Game 5 of the NLDS on Thursday night. On the Cubs’ radio broadcast, Len Kasper referred to Chicago’s four-run fifth inning as a game of “baseball bingo” — the two-out rally included a run scored on a passed-ball strikeout, a costly catcher’s interference, and an RBI hit-by-pitch — and I can’t describe it any better than that. The game included controversial calls, strange misplays, questionable replay reviews, everything. Baseball’s always weird, but that game was especially weird.

And it’s a bit weird, certainly, that the Nationals have never won a postseason series in franchise history, dating back to their time as the Montreal Expos. With the Seattle Mariners, theirs is one of only two MLB organizations to never appear in the World Series, and Seattle did win divisional series in 1995, 2000, and 2001.

Mitigating circumstances account for some of the Expos’ failures: The club’s birth happened to coincide with the start of the free-agency era in baseball, and generally lousy attendance figures in the Expos’ latter years contributed to their inability to maintain payrolls like those of the sport’s top-tier teams. The game and the way teams are constructed has changed since the team moved to Washington in 2005, though, and the Nationals suffer far fewer financial limitations than their Canadian predecessors.

Treating them as a separate entity, then, shows this: The Washington Nationals have reached the postseason in four of their thirteen seasons in existence — all in the last six years — and never advanced beyond the NLDS. And there’s a simple, if unsatisfying, explanation for the phenomenon: Bad luck.

It’s bad luck. That’s it. Many in the club’s fanbase and media will now squint and scratch to identify some indication of systemic postseason inadequacy, but the Nats’ four October losses have come under three different managers, and only five Nationals players from the disappointing 2012 team still played for the disappointing 2017 team. It would be silly to argue that there’s anything inherent to Bryce Harper, Stephen Strasburg, Jason Werth, Ryan Zimmerman or Gio Gonzalez that prevents their teams from winning in the playoffs. Those are good baseball players! Clubs have succeeded, I promise, with far less talented performers on their rosters and dudes with far worse attitudes in their clubhouses.

There’s but one single, common thread that doomed all four of the Nationals’ postseason teams. They play baseball, baseball is super hard, and baseball is dominated by randomness.

Baseball is so dominated by randomness that fans and media, despite all their biases and inclinations and knowledge, should be best served approaching every short postseason series like its a coin toss. Use this year as an example: Of the four divisional series, two were won by the club with the better regular-season record, two were not. Heck, the same is true for 2015 and 2016. Our feeble human minds struggle to grasp the extent to which baseball’s postseason outcomes are dictated by fickle fortune, so we use crystal-clear hindsight to draw up narratives more elegant and more convincing than, “well, these things just kind of happen.”

Had the Nats, before the 2012 postseason, agreed to settle every one of their divisional series from that point forward by flipping a quarter, seeing it land on tails four times in a row would be a huge bummer. And it is that! There’s only a 1-in-16 chance of that happening, so it’s unlikely. But it’s no more unlikely than, say, a homer from Bryce Harper, who has averaged about one longball every 18 at-bats in his career. In a sport with the outrageous spectrum of possibilities demonstrated in the baseball-bingo contest Thursday night, does it really seem so outrageous for something to happen when it has a 6.25% chance of happening?

If anything, the Nats’ recent run of postseason failures should be seen, paradoxically, as a testament to their success. The main key to winning in the MLB postseason is reaching the MLB postseason, and doing that four times in six seasons is typically a good recipe for advancing at least once. These Nats have had their share of drama in the past six years, no doubt, but their defining characteristic is that they’ve been consistently excellent.

The frustrating issue, and undoubtedly a good cause for anxiety inside the Beltway after another early October exit, is that the Washington club does appear to be approaching the end of its current window of contention. Harper and Daniel Murphy are set for free agency after next season, and Anthony Rendon is due to hit the open market after 2019, by which point Max Scherzer will be 35 years old and Stephen Strasburg will be 31. They’ve got some promising prospects on both sides of the ball and good young Major Leaguers like Trea Turner and Michael Taylor already in the lineup, but for the Nats to fail to capitalize on this group of great players would — and should — go down as an epic disappointment. Yet it’s hardly the signal of any broad, sweeping organizational mismanagement or inadequacy.

A good team lost to another good team in a five-game series. Harper hurt his knee in mid-August and never looked fully right after returning in late September, and the the best offense in the National League happened to go cold at a very inconvenient time. A good defensive catcher endured a few rough moments behind the plate at a bad time. Some calls that might have gone their way did not go their way. Some balls that might not have found holes in their defense did exactly that. If any of it happened in mid-May or late August and the Nats happened to lose three out of five to good teams, no one would have even worked up the energy to shrug. But because it happened in October, it will all be magnified and amplified and analyzed and scrutinized, yielding no conclusion more accurate or more damning than this one: Every postseason series needs a loser, and the Nats happen to have drawn that fate in four straight.