Sure it hurts, but don't give up on the Nats just yet

Let me start by saying this isn't intended to be sour grapes at all.

I was hoping the Washington Nationals would beat the Cubs, advance to the NLCS and get the monkey of never escaping the first round of the playoffs off their back.

They didn't, and I'm pretty well devastated.

That said, 97 wins and a knockdown, drag-out battle with the defending World Series champion is nothing of which to be ashamed.

This is the end.

After all, it was obvious from early in the season that it was going to be tough. After only 23 games, in which he had hit .297 and scored 24 runs (a phenomenal total), center fielder Adam Eaton was lost for the season with an injury.

Less than halfway into the season, promising young pitcher Joe Ross was injured and lost for the year.

Starting left fielder Jayson Werth suffered a foot injury and played in just 70 games.

Burns' look at Vietnam recalls special memories

Editor's Note: I wish I were writing enough that I never went back and posted old stuff, but with the end of Ken Burns' "The Vietnam War," I thought this was worth revisiting. That and the fact that Jed Rumble told me how much this had meant to him. I wrote for a living for 30 years, and I think this might be one of the two or three best things I've ever written.

When I visit The Wall in Washington, all I can say is that it is the only place I visit that makes me cry. The original piece was written nearly 10 years ago. Don Dark is no longer with us, and while it's a cliche, I have to hope he and Jon are together somewhere, sitting around a campfire and dwelling on the absurdity of it all.

Had Jon Rumble lived, he might never have been a senator or a millionaire, but I know one thing with all my heart.

The world would be a better place with him in it.

FOREVER YOUNG

"…be courageous and be brave, and in my heart you’ll always stay forever young.”

 Georgeanne Fletcher says Jon Rumble was never her friend in high school.

“I didn’t know who his friends were, where he lived or anything about his family,” she said. “We never shared a class or had lunch together.”

But thanks to a request from the drama teacher, Joan Bedinger, Georgeanne got to know Jon in the spring of 1967, and more than 40 years later, she still remembers him.

“Jon had been picked for the male lead in the senior class play, ‘The Unsinkable Molly Brown,’” she said. “Miss Bedinger asked me to help him learn his music. He had a good voice, but he didn’t read music and had been selected for his dramatic rather than his musical ability.”