It can’t be captured on paper. It probably can’t be captured in words. The Royals – baseball – Kansas City – it’s all part of me. It’s part of who I am, who I was, what I’ve become, and something I think about every day. Each of these things has aided in my passion for life, and the payoff of the playoff has finally happened. And trust me, I know we’re not done.

The Royals are the base of the glue that holds me to my childhood friends. It’s the way us rare Midwest folks in NYC communicate with one another. And it’s traditionally come with a lot of venting, what-ifs, and genuine frustration.

I don’t really have KC bars in NYC. I never had fellow fans in college. Hell, I spent last night at Foley’s screaming, dancing, and poppin’ bottles with an ad man from Olathe, a teacher from Garden City, and Rex Hudler a kid from Dodge City, and I couldn’t have cared less that I had never met them before. The unabashed thrill we shared reverberated throughout the bar and was met with such raucous applause and an understanding of what had happened that it proved what we felt was real.

I don’t want to write about what was going on in 1985 or what this means for Kansas City. Journalists everywhere (thankfully, I might add) will be doing this for days. I want to keep this short and simple and put a few things on paper so I can savor this day. So this is what flew through my mind last night while I witnessed history and thought about what it meant to me:

• I have gone through three years of pre-school, six years of elementary school, three years of middle school, four years of high school, four years of college, and four years of “adult” life, and every year prior, September meant only getting ready for the Chiefs to thrill and to disappoint. But at least we sometimes got a winning season and a playoff game to come with the pain.

• This is about my dad writing a letter to Royals management and canceling his season tickets after the 1994 strike, when the Royals had won 14 straight and were closing in on Chicago for first place. Here’s hoping another letter is written after the post-season this year.

• It’s about every trip to the the practice field or the batting cage and angling myself at the plate like Dean Palmer and Jeff King when the rest of the world stood like Griffey and Sosa.

• It’s about Willie Wilson living down the block from me serving as a constant reminder of the Royal days that had preceded my generation. So much, in fact, that I couldn’t even brag about it because my classmates didn’t know who Willie was.

• It’s about seeing George Brett at the old 7-11 next to Dairy Queen down on 103rd and Roe and getting his autograph on a used Keno card.

• It’s about watching at least 1,500 Royals games, for 4,500 hours, or half a year, or almost 2% of my entire life. I’m scared to calculate in the time spent reading, researching, talking, or writing about them.

• It’s about screaming and jumping on the living room sofa after a Johnny Damon home run in the first inning of a meaningless 1998 game, and every other celebration that “didn’t matter”. But that emotion was real – and every time they let me down – each bit of that negative energy built up, if only to make last night’s victory that much more powerful.

• It’s about making my screen name as a kid Brn4bsbl32 and wanting every other middle school student to know I was born for this. I guess it just took a while to grow up.

• And yeah, it’s about every trip to Kauffman, every drive down Sni-A-Bar Road past Feed My Lambs International and the nitrogen tanks, and every pre-game rib while I watched LC doze off to the soaps on his 1992 Mitsubishi big screen.

• And it’s about always being a baseball card junkie. And not like Guy Fieri being a kimchi junkie – I think I have problems worse than him. Hoarder is more than an appropriate word. I own between 30,000 – 50,000 cards. My parents have a storage facility in Kansas City 50% dedicated to my boxes of cards. My entire closet in my bedroom in KC is filled with marked, numbered boxes from over the years. In high school I would stop by Target to check for new packs in the trading card section, which I would run my thumb through to “feel” for the jersey cards. I once went to eight Rite-Aid stores in one day because trading cards were 75% off. I cleared every shelf. I started buying and selling cards on eBay in 5th grade under my mom’s name. I had Beckett’s all around the house, gnarled and faded from months of wear and memorization. In first grade my dad took me to a flea market in downtown KC where we bought unmarked boxes of 5,000 baseball cards for me to dive in and sift through. Yikes, I digress – what matters is that every single pack I ever opened, and every card I every bought – all I wanted were for them to be Royals.

• But really, it’s about the unbridled optimism and enthusiasm that (Stupidly? Shamelessly?) never left me – when all the jaded fans out there who saw it all in the 70s and 80s kept grunting and looking away, my generation looked on, waiting and wondering, if and when it would ever happen.

I know they’re not done. Not this season, this year, or this decade. But finally, finally, it’s really happening, and I’m proud that I’ve always been proud to be a fan.