Summer's nearly over, and when you're done packing up the propane grill, stowing your linen pants, and putting the finishing touches on your "Gigli" Halloween costume, you might want to grab a fistful of dollars and head to the local bookie -- because this year, I swear, the Cubs are going all the way.

Okay, so maybe I'm reading too much into the bumper crop of "What if?" stories that have surfaced lately. If I wasn't stuck in New York watching the Yankees buy championships, I'd probably be down at the corner of Addison and Sheffield with every other Cubs fan, disinterring the postseason hopes that we buried last year in an unmarked grave.

Baseball fan or not, you're probably familiar with the oft-recycled story by now: Despite their on-field woes, back-office blunders, and the whole corking thing, the Cubs are flirting with first place, teetering on the precipice of a playoff berth and -- gasp -- maybe even a chance at a championship series.

It's become a tired staple of the sports beat, dutifully rehashed each year in newspapers, magazines, and on Web sites by sportswriters too cruel to let Cubs fans stew untouched in a near-century of failure.

It's "Joy in Wrigleyville," noted SI.com columnist David Vecsey. "For 24 splendid hours last week, the Chicago Cubs were in first place." Thanks Dave. "Exactly 96 years later, the White Sox are in first place and the Cubs remain within striking distance," Chicago Tribune scribe Charles Storch reminded us. (Ignore the White Sox crap, nobody ever really thinks they're going to win, and even if they did nobody would really care anyway). And "Don't count out all-Chicago series," warned MSNBC, pegging ticket prices for a cross-town Chicago at $5,000.

I love reading about my team, but here's the problem: Cubs fans are like virgins, really, and all this talk about championships is akin to unleashing a 16-year-old in a smut shop with a tub of Vaseline. We can't help but imagine how great it would feel to go all the way -- yet most of us have never made it to first base (please excuse the pun).

By 2008, Cubs fans will have survived a winless century, nourished only by the fumes of conquests past, our beautiful ballpark, and the great, cruel wet dream that this year might be THE year. Dreaming, said New York Times sports columnist Ira Berkow, is "what Chicago baseball fans have done best, or second best. Best may just be drowning their sorrows either in the beverage of their choice, or Lake Michigan, whichever is more handy."

Berkow (himself one of dozens of long-suffering Chicago-born sportswriters) is right about one thing: Alcohol is the only true salve for a loser's wounds. But thanks, in part, to columns like his, we're not nursing our Budweisers down at the cubbyhole -- we're setting ourselves up for the painful, and inevitable, case of post-season blueballs that will strike when the team withers and droops down the stretch like Hugh Hefner's penis after the Viagra wears off.

Most of us would sell our souls to see the Cubbies in the World Series. I've tried, and no one's buying. And if the past nine decades of flaccid baseball history is any bellwether, I'd sooner expect a Jumbotron screening of Janet Reno's hardcore porn debut opposite Ron "Hedgehog" Jeremy at Wrigley Field -- and that would require the unlikely installation of said Jumbotron to begin with.

I've tried to ignore it, but if you listen closely, you can actually hear the pffffft of the Cubs' season deflating like a punctured bicycle tire already. Ssshh… Can you hear it? There it is… Pfffffffffffffffffffffttttt…

It starts softly, just a faint whisper when the tube first springs a leak (last season it was the interleague drubbing at the hands of their cross-town rivals, the White Sox). But after a couple of demoralizing back-to-back losses, that tiny leak will widen into a mighty eruption of tube and tire, sending rider and bike catapulting head over heels into the craggy, glass-strewn pavement.

Cubs fans have picked the shards out of their post-season road rash since 1908, so you'd think we'd be inured to the false hope inspired by the team's routine, post-All Star break flourish. In theory, we know well the pitfalls of "hope" when it comes to the Cubs. But in the real world, we have no choice but to believe the hype.

Which brings me to the point of this rant. We could easily blame the enablers, that vicious and cruel cabal of Sportswriters across the country that insists on stirring the pot. How many times, after all, do we have to read about the Billy Goat curse, or hear from some wheezing nonagenarian holding onto life just for one last run at the pennant?

But it's much easier to blame everyone who gobbles up our stories of woe.

You know who you are. You're the Yankees fan who thinks winning is a birthright. You're the Braves fan who just wasn't satisfied with one championship back in 1995. You're the Marlins fan who cheered as the team purchased the 1997 championship, the Diamondbacks fan who rode Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling's coattails in 2001, or a fan of one of the countless other baseball teams that won it all despite histories shallower than the Olson Twins and the charisma of Tom Arnold's jowls.

Sure, I'm bitter. Sour grapes? Guilty. But I'm just a product of season after season spent skidding toward a concrete berm like a gasoline truck on black ice, the manager flailing and weaving with all the fury of a meth-addled truck driver (Right, Red Sox fans?).

They say patience is a virtue, and hope may indeed spring eternal, but I'm not leaving this up to fate anymore. We've paid our dues, now let the curse be reversed. If the Cubs don't win by 2008, the 100 year anniversary of their last championship, I will personally lure Harry Caray's ghost from its grave with a case or two of Old Style Tallboys and convince it to pull a poltergeist on your clubhouses and dugouts.

Well I'll try, anyhow. Unless, of course, this year's the year... Which it is, right? It might be, it could be, it is? Somebody better save me a seat in the bleachers...

About Matt Bean

Do the Cubs have a chance? Talk at the The Water Cooler