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Proof That We Only Exist Inside the Mind of a Kansas City Royals Fan

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Julie Denesha - Getty Images Sport

Julie Denesha – Getty Images

Somewhere, right now, in a distant, yet parallel reality, a fan of the Kansas City Royals sleeps soundly through the night. In this fan’s dreams, flashes of the impossible just happened: the lowly Royals, still the laughing stock of the MLB in this fan’s reality, ascended to greatness in a memorable season that forever changed the history books and earned the organization relevance for the first time in three decades. Inside the dreaming mind of this optimistic, perhaps naive Royals fan, Kansas City’s nigh-forgotten franchise fights through October to nearly earn themselves a World Series title, only to be stopped single-handedly by a fittingly overpowered super-villain that could surely only exist inside the mind of an overly creative sports fan. This dreaming fan knew the villain only by the name of “Mad-Bum.”

The bittersweet finish to this dreamed-up season only left the optimistic fan more room to conjure up a sequel. This fan knows somewhere, deep down, that they could wake up any moment and return to their bitter reality, a sad world wherein those Royals are pretending Jonathan Sanchez is great and Mitch Maier throws more pitches than Yordano Ventura. He knows that he could blink and go back to the real world, where the franchise is still reeling from cheap, poor management and cursing the name of Allard Baird like he’s Voldemort or Khan from Star Trek or Satan.

Because they know how painful being a fan in that real world can be, because they understand what long-term failure felt like, this dreamer keeps dreaming big. Season No. 2 started off with fresh faces and crowd favorites alike, contributing in poetically equal fashion to send the Royals out of the gate with a bang. How else could Mike Moustakas look like a successful inside-out hitter already after batting .212 and pulling everything last season? How else could those lowly Royals, a team the vast majority of experts predicted to regress, start their encore with an unblemished record after the first week of the regular season?

I could go on and on — Paulo Orlando starting his big-league career like nobody in baseball history ever has, KC’s new ace looking like a Cy Young contender, the drastic increase in power, and so much more — but it’s all a dream, so I won’t bore you. It can’t even exist. It’s too good. It’s been too much fun, and it’s barely the middle of April in Year 2 of what could be an era of Kansas City Royals baseball mattering nationally, all the time. The only way it all exists is inside the dreaming mind of a gullible, overly optimistic fan somewhere here in KC.

That lovably hopeful fan is still dreaming, and they’ll appreciate this for as long as they can, so who knows what will happen next? Still, we need to appreciate this while we can, before a barking dog or a bad muffler in that other reality blinks us out of existence altogether. I, too, can only hope that this fan doesn’t wake up for a long, long time.

Doug LaCerte is a writer for www.RantSports.com. Follow him on Twitter @DLaC67, “like” him on Facebook and add him to your network on Google.

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