Washington

A SPORTS team obviously cannot create a civic renaissance. But when a city and a team happen to go on a good run at the same time, it can be particularly sweet, and it’s happened more often than you might think.

The Dallas Cowboys won two Super Bowls in the 1970s just as an oil boom was remaking Texas. The San Francisco 49ers displaced the Cowboys in the 1980s when the personal-computer revolution was enriching no small number of Bay Area residents. The Yankees’ re-emergence in the late 1990s will always be a chapter in New York’s larger comeback story.

Now Washington may be getting its turn.

The city was a baseball laughingstock for most of the last century. “First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League,” as the vaudeville joke put it. For the final few decades of the 20th century, Washington did not even have a team, making it easily the biggest metro area without one. The absence became yet another sign of the capital’s cultural otherness.

Today, seven years after the Montreal Expos moved to Washington and became the Nationals, they have surprised the prognosticators with, as of Friday, the second-best record in baseball, behind only the Cincinnati Reds. The Nats, as we call them here, are on pace to give Washington its first postseason baseball since 1933. The young pitching staff dominates opposing hitters, and a dynamic 19-year-old outfielder — Bryce Harper, nicknamed Bam Bam, for an early temper tantrum that involved a bat, a wall and ultimately some stitches — evokes a young Mickey Mantle, both statistically and stylistically.