Joe Davis’ exclamation during the comeback against the Phillies wasn’t the call for this Sunday’s extra-inning walk-off victory over the team from up north, but it is what I keep returning to as I try to understand the feelings of being at Dodger Stadium that night.

"Absolute Madness"

For the Los Angeles Dodgers, those five syllables amount to a distillation of the season. When they win the World Series, and they will win the World Series, it will be the title of the best-selling book written about this team.

Some will chide me for being so declarative, adamant that speaking it aloud risks imposing a Jinx. But truly, I have risked no such thing; for I am not simply hoping it happens, I know that it will.

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I know this because I am an experienced student of hope, by way of proximity to my father, a long-suffering Cubs fan. Few will admit it, but that was always the true curse of the Cubs; it was not a Billy Goat spurned at the entrance gate or some divine or demonic intervention, but something imminently human haunting the organization - the eternal curse of hope.

Prior to 2016, experienced Cubs fans liked to pretend that they learned long ago hope was a thing to be left well enough alone. They were above it, and they, being experts in the pain of lost hopes knew better. But at their core, very few Cubs fans ever truly lost hope. It just lay dormant and so they suffered each time the Cubbies teased them with a whiff of an appearance in the fall classic.

Over last summer, that relationship to the team changed. Cubs fans finally knew something greater and more powerful than hope: A feeling of calm certainty, nurtured and reinforced by the greatness of the team before them.

The realization that this was the year, the truth that the ‘Cubbies were real’ this season, engulfed the fanbase as a high tide does a stretch of shoreline: The ups and downs of specific swells gaining more ground and then losing some, but the sea continues to rise, and the shore, at last, submerges beneath the waves.

Come October, the fans did not worry about a Giants team powered by an even-number in the one's place. And when our Dodgers shut-out the Cubs for 21 consecutive innings, there was no real anxiety, because they knew their team would find a way.

And when the Cubs went down 3-1 in the World Series, my father, a man who would recite old Cubbies slogans, "The Cubs will shine in ‘69!" and, "The Cubs’ll come through in ‘72!" as a kind of mantra against hope, said to me with a tone reserved for weathermen predicting rain in Portland:

"The Cubs’ll Win. Wait and See."

I doubted him, I doubted the Cubs, and I worried for the pain he would endure if they didn't do it. But what I didn’t know, and couldn’t understand until experiencing this Dodgers’ season, is that he no longer had to worry about being let down. His voice was not that of someone with hope, but of someone who truly believed: Someone with faith.

During Game Seven, I was in the midst of travelling home. I followed the game on my phone until the battery indicator shrivelled to a tiny sliver of red, and I turned it off. There was a phone call I would need to make, whatever happened. For the bottom of the tenth inning, I was on the red line, underground, and out of the reach of any signal.

While I was on that train, the Cubs won it all.

I called him after I emerged from beneath the ground and it was clear he had cried some. He told me how he knew, he knew, even after the Indians tied it, and especially during the rain delay, that he knew they would win because the 2016 Cubs were inevitable. That was who they were.

And yet his faith, his knowing that it would happen, did not lessen his feelings in that moment when Bryant’s throw found the back of Rizzo’s glove. He knew it would be, and his joy was undiminished by knowing.

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Now in 2017, that's what it feels like to be a fan of these Dodgers. That's what it felt like watching the game on Sunday night. We are no longer are holding onto a hope that they will win. We have faith that they will. And the certainty of it all has not diluted the joy of witnessing the absolute madness of each improbable moment.