It's over

Something odd happened to me the other day: The Twins were playing, and I could have had the game on, and I chose not to. I don't know when that last happened, when I consciously chose to go without the game.

I think that speaks to how sour the 2016 season felt to Twins fans in general and to me in particular. I can pick through the rubble and find some encouraging things -- Byron Buxton's September! -- but 103 losses is 103 losses. The Twins won two games in a row Aug. 16-17, and didn't do it again until the final weekend, Oct. 1-2. To go basically a month-and-a-half without even the basis of a winning streak ... uff da.

There have been other get-it-over-with Septembers in Twins history, of course. Some of them even came with the team in contention. 1977, for example: The Twins were 75-58 and 2.5 games out of first place after sweeping a double header on Aug. 29; they went 9-19 the rest of the way and finished 17.5 games behind the Royals. (They won their last two games that year too.) That was the year Rod Carew hit .388, and that's what those of us who were around back then remember of that season, not the collapse.

Maybe some year we'll come to remember 2016 for Brian Dozier's 42 homers or for Buxton's emergence. Maybe we'll remember it as the end of the MacPhail-Ryan era, the second epoch of Twins history. We had the Calvin Griffith years, and the MacPhail-Ryan years, and now ... now we'll see if Derek Falvey can construct a more modern organziation that will last a generation or more. 

And perhaps that's why I was willing to ignore that game last week. Not only did it not matter in the context of 2016, there wasn't much reason to believe it mattered in the context of what follows this offseason.