The Chicago Cubs quest to be the 2016 World Series Ch....Ch....Ch.... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh man! I almost got through that whole thing with a straight face!

At 7pm today Mountain Standard Time, the Chicago Cubs will start their postseason campaign by hosting the San Francisco Giants.

Many Cubs fans are riding high right now. The Cubs finished the season with 103 wins, the most in all of Major League Baseball, and their .640 winning percentage beats the next highest (Texas and Washington, each of which had 95 wins) by .054...which is more than the gap between the .500 Kansas City Royals and the wild card Jays/Orioles. Their OPS was the third highest in the league, Kris Bryant was a top ten home run hitter, and four of their players are in the top 15 for on-base percentage. But the real story of the Cubs this year has been the pitching, not the hitting: Jake Arrieta allowed the lowest batting average in the majors this year, and three more Cubs pitchers are in the top ten. Three Cubs pitchers are in the top ten lowest WHIP in the league as well, with two Cubs pitchers taking the top two ERA spots in all of baseball this season. The Cubs can play a dominant game, no question about it.

Will they win the World Series?

[Editor's Note: Feynman and Coulter's Love Child is busy having another laughing and crying fit, so I'll assume the answer is no.]

Okay look. The Cubs are riding high. The last time they broke 100 wins was 1935...when they only played 154. Shockingly enough, that mark only ranks fifth in the all-time number of season wins (they won 116 in 1906 when they lost the World Series). But the Cubs have been here before. They won 97 games just last season, 97 in 2008, 96 in 1984, and 98 in 1945...when again a season was only 154 games. You might remember hearing something about a Cubs World Series run in 1945...most Cubs fans today weren't even born when that campaign went on, but it reverberates through history.

The Cubs lost the World Series because of a goddamned goat. We've remarked how weird it is that the Curse of the Goat remains to this day...but yet it remains. Every year, a Cubs season ends in heartbreak. The nature of the heartbreak changes year to year, but it doesn't ever go away. And I mean never.

In that 1984 season, the Cubs had their own "Bill Fucking Buckner Moment" when Cubs first baseman Leon Durham allowed San Diego's Carmelo Martínez easy hit to dribble through his knees and score a tying RBI that kicked off a Padres rally that eliminated the Cubs from the postseason. Third Edge of the Sword favourite James Loney hit a rare home run to give the Dodgers a 4-2 Game 1 lead...oh, it was a 2-0 game before he hit it. In 1969 the "black cat incident" jinxed the Cubs and started them on the road to a losing streak that cost them the pennant. The Cubs would go on to get swept after leading the National League with 97 wins. And every baseball fan knows about the 2003 Steve Bartman incident. But there's more to the Cubs heartbreak than the Billy Sianis incident that kept them from ever even seeing the World Series.

The Chicago Cubs lost the World Series in 1906 and then won in 1907 and 1908. They then played in the 1910, 1918, 1929, 1932, 1935, 1938, and 1945 World Series. They won a whopping eight games in those seven World Series. The worst of them was the 1935 Series where the Cubs blew a 3-2 lead in Game 6 and then coughed up a weak hit in the ninth inning over Billy Herman's glove. The Cubs had won 21 games straight in September and then lost when it really mattered.

Second to that had to be the 1932 World Series. You know that one....Babe Ruth gestured to the stands in Game 3 and then delivered on his promise. Despite having a lead in every game, the Cubs were swept in four. That was probably the second worst World Series game in Cubs history. The worst? Game 4 of the 1929 World Series where the Cubs had an 8-0 lead going into the bottom of the 7th...an hour later the score was 10-8 and the Cubs were out...including a routine fly ball dropped that turned into a 3-run inside-the-park home run.

So Cubs fans are going to be disappointed. There's no question of that. The bigger the hype for a Cubs season, the bigger the disappointment. And that's why every time you see younger Cubs fans getting excited, you'll see an older fan...not even necessarily that old, just more experienced...standing behind him and telling him to calm down.

You develop the callouses eventually. The Cubs are on top of the league. They are the favourites to win the NLDS, the NLCS, and the World Series.

They won't. They'll collapse. Somehow. Almost certainly before making it to the Series. It will be another chapter, it will be glorious, and it will be something nobody could expect. A routine fly ball in the sun. A routine bloop to first base. A cat in the dugout. A goat in the stands. An overly aggressive fan in the stands. A superstar calling the ball in a way never before seen in sports.

I'll be cheering on the Cubs for the next week. Maybe even the next two weeks.

But not three. I won't get overly excited. They're the Cubs.