With the Chicago Cubs down to their last three outs against the New York Mets, I thought of my grandmother in her living room watching the game saying, “Come on, Cubbies,” her voice just slightly dry from age and cigarette smoke.

The image of Wrigley Field in front of me seems to fade, replaced by a forlorn stretch of southbound Interstate 380 through Cedar Rapids, Iowa, just before the Wilson Avenue exit with a cemetery overlooking the road. I think of that, then the small, smoky living room on the southwest side of town. I think of Pepsi and miniature Reese’s cups and a nondescript photo of Sammy Sosa at the bottom of the stairway leading to the second floor.

I’m thinking of my grandparents’ house before I think again of the highway; then I try to put the thought out of my mind.

See, being a Cubs fan is an exercise in nostalgia. It’s about the process, not the result. It’s not about winning and losing. Being a Cubs fan is about enjoying baseball for the sake of baseball and relishing a beautiful day at the ballpark – whether that happens to be at the Friendly Confines or anywhere else in the country. Embracing the Cubs means choosing a path where you already know the ending – but hey, at least you know it’ll be a fun ride while it lasts.

But for all the good vibes of drinking Old Milwaukee in the bleachers or owning up to the “lovable losers” identity, there’s a dark and much more insidious sense of fatalism underneath that thick layer of optimism. Every time someone says, “This is the year!” it harkens back to the now 108 years of ineptitude that defines the Chicago Cubs. When you start down that familiar path each season that Cubs fans know so well, everyone knows that autumn means the end.

That end might come in September or October, but it always happens. Sometimes it’s expected; you let the end come gently as another season bleeds into a memory. Sometimes it’s abrupt – a sudden collapse that guns down a season just when you think it’s maturing into something different. Yet this October managed to wrap all of that into one.

Before the season, I didn’t expect the Cubs to make the playoffs, I didn’t expect them to have the third-best record in baseball and I certainly didn’t expect them to knock off the Pirates and Cardinals on their way to the NLCS. You knew this couldn’t be ‘The Year,’ but you couldn’t deny that there was a special feeling surrounding this team, making the end of this season so much more difficult to deal with.

It’s not that the end of this season was exceptionally sad or disappointing, just…difficult. When the Cubs went down 2-0 in the NLCS, that fatalistic predisposition began to creep in on the optimism that had fueled Chicago’s postseason run. Watching Jake Arrieta lose Game 2 in New York was the sudden sense of dread, and a Game 3 loss at Wrigley Field sent Cubs fans back to their perpetual state of impending doom, waiting for this season’s inevitable, and now gentle, demise.

I couldn’t shake thoughts of my grandparents’ house as I watched Chicago’s 2015 season die. I’ve probably spent more time watching the Cubs in that living room than anywhere else in the world. It’s where I used to watch Sammy Sosa, Corey Patterson and Mark Prior. I spent summer after summer in a small house in southwest Cedar Rapids as seasons came and went, watching WGN alongside my grandparents, the biggest Cubs fans I have known – so much so that the Cubs were significant in the eulogy for my grandmother when she died in 2010.

I suppose it was around that time that I stopped following baseball for a while. With the deaths of my grandmother in October and Ron Santo, my all-time favorite Cub, a few months later, it didn’t seem the same anymore. I hadn’t watched more than a handful of Cubs games in the last five years until this season, and I think that’s why this season the end is much more complex and difficult to reconcile.

That’s why, as the Cubs recorded their last out, the feeling of October and ‘The End’ crept in again. That’s why the image of the highway and the cemetery overlooking it are tattooed into my brain, and I’m saddened by the thought of all the generations of lifelong Cubs fans who have come and gone without seeing their team win a World Series. I remember the funeral on a grey, somber morning in autumn, and I feel myself start to dissociate with baseball again.

And yet, just before I turn away from the screen to close the book on another Cubs season, I think once more of my grandmother. I think of celebrating division pennants, her saying, “Go Cubbies!” and how I haven’t been to her grave since we laid her to rest. I think that maybe the next time I drive over that forgettable stretch of highway, I’ll take the exit toward the cemetery and pay her a visit.

Maybe this is the year.

Jacob Sevening can be reached at seve8586@stthomas.edu.