Is Washington on the verge of ending a 90-year drought?

It's funny how life changes.

I was a fairly rabid sports fan growing up, rooting mostly for the teams that were closest to my home in Northern Virginia. The teams I cared about the most in my late teens and 20s were the Washington Redskins and the Bullets, although I'll reluctantly admit to a short time rooting for the New York Knicks of Reed, Bradley, Frazier, DeBusschere and Monroe.

Baseball was always my favorite sport, though, and since there was no baseball team in Washington after 1971, I spent most of the next decade or two rooting for the Cincinnati Reds.

Once I moved to Southern California in 1990, I started really loving the majesty of Dodger Stadium, and covering the Dodgers in 1990 and 1991 made me a fan of the team for the rest of the 20 years I lived on the West Coast.

It was a great day in 2005 when Washington got a baseball team for the first time in nearly 35 years. The last time I had gone to a game in D.C. was 1970, when Shelley Marcus was my girlfriend and we double-dated with friends.

We sat in the left-field upper deck, but other than that I have no memory of the game. Priorities, you know.

RFK Stadium, 2005

Anyway, when the Montreal Expos became the Washington Nationals in 2005, it was wonderful. I lived 2,500 miles away in California, but we made it to Virginia that spring for my sister's wedding and of course we caught a ballgame at ancient RFK Stadium.

The team was bad for a couple of years, and it was a while before the new stadium was completed, but in the last few years, the Nationals have become a very good team.

In 2012 they won 98 games, although they didn't make it past the first round of the playoffs. They were expected to be just as good this year, but got off to a slow start and won only 86 games.

Fans are still very optimistic, though. The front office has done a wonderful job of building a team from the bottom up, helped immensely by having the first pick in the draft two years in a row. That has given Washington a top-flight pitcher (Stephen Strasburg) and an outstanding hitter (Bryce Harper) as the foundation.

Strasburg in Atlanta.

Of course they have a lot more than that, including what might be the deepest starting rotation in the majors. Strasburg, Gio Gonzalez (21 wins in 2012) and Jordan Zimmerman (19 wins this year) are as good a top three as anyone has, and last week they added another outstanding starter, Doug Fister, in a trade with Detroit.

Will they win?

You really never can tell. For 15 years, the Atlanta Braves made the playoffs every year. Yet they only made it to the World Series three times and won it all only once.

Doug Fister

For most of this century, the New York Yankees have spent more money on players than any other team in baseball, but in the last 12 seasons they have won only one World Series.

My guess is that Washington fans are really going to enjoy themselves over the next five to 10 years. There hasn't been a World Series in Washington since 1933, and the only time the old Senators ever won one was 1924.

You can talk about long-suffering Red Sox fans (until 2004), and of course the hapless Cubs haven't won since 2008. But next year it will be 90 years for Washington. It'll be interesting to see if there are any fans who remember 1924.

I have enough trouble remembering 1970.