I’ve seen the Cardinals win a World Series and have some great seasons, but I’ve never been so proud to call them my team.

We should consider ourselves to be the luckiest fans in baseball after what we just witnessed.

Quite simply, the Cardinals had every reason to be average this year. They had plenty of excuses to mail it in and say, “we’ll get ’em next year”.

So many things went wrong this season, things that don’t happen to playoff teams, much less World Series teams.

Pitching ace Adam Wainwright didn’t start a game and made a weak rotation even weaker.

Ryan Franklin imploded and forced the team to use a rookie closer for most of the season.

Everyone panicked when Albert Pujols didn’t sign a contract extension and again when he broke his wrist in June.

The team was forced to trade the talented Colby Rasmus just for some decent pitching help in July.

Even after those things appeared to be fixed, the Cardinals somehow got worse and fell ten and a half games back in the Wild Card race on Aug. 24.

At that point, no reasonable person could have expected a comeback like this. Teams that fall that far behind are obviously too flawed are too unstable to recover.

But the Cardinals knew they had the makings of a great team and never quit, even when so many of us gave up on them.

That’s what makes us lucky.

When so many other teams would have called it a season, the Cardinals outperformed our expectations and gave us the most incredible two months of baseball we’ve ever seen.

They say the Carinals have the best fans in baseball, but we owe them a tip of the cap this time.