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Cubs fans have been waiting longer than Vladimir and Estragon in "Waiting for Godot" to toast a title with Old Style, but – who knows – maybe it's really finally the year. Before the refrain "Wait 'til next year," the auto was still in its infancy and the world still relied on iceboxes and steamboats.

Optimism is raging – perhaps a little irrationally – with the offseason additions of brilliant manager Joe Maddon and the dominating ace Jon Lester to a bumper crop of Major League Baseball's most highly touted prospects. Las Vegas odds are 14:1, the best in years. And Back to the Future II predicted the Cubs' century-long championship drought would end in 2015, so there's that.

Who knows, maybe this fall it will be time to retire all the hackneyed jokes — how the Cubs are like dirt because they always get swept, or how Halloween is the favorite holiday of all Cubs because it's all they have to look forward to in October.

It's been 107 years. That's a long, long time. There's a vast chasm between now and 1908, the first year New York City ever dropped a ball in Times Square to ring in the new year or that anyone reached the North Pole. The last time the Cubs won a championship, it was an era we would find unrecognizable today.