In a weird year for baseball, the Seattle Mariners are insisting on making it as weird as possible. The Mariners have transitioned into winning ways a bit lately, slowly but surely working themselves into the playoff picture. If you had to pick a year the Mariners would break their 18-year playoff drought, why not go with 2020, solely with the iron-clad reasoning of “it is 2020.”

The 2020 season is one huge asterisk in the Wikipedia entry of MLB. The postseason will be no different. MLB has slowly inched more teams into the playoffs, introducing the first wild card in 1994 and the second in 2012. Still, even including both wild cards, only 1/3 of all teams make the playoffs each year. For the most part, year in and year out, it was easier to swallow the longest playoff drought in every major sport because baseball is also the hardest sport to make the playoffs.

Every other major sports league in America sits at approximately 50 percent of the league entering the playoffs, give or take a few teams. This season, due to the pandemic, MLB announced a grand total of 16 teams would play in the postseason–over 50 percent of the league.

Since I’ve aged enough to acquire the limited disposable income to attend baseball games on occasion, the hapless and playoff-less Mariners are more-or-less a part of my identity as solely that: losers. The city of Seattle has the Super Bowl-winning Seattle Seahawks, MLS Champion Seattle Sounders, WNBA title holders Seattle Storm, the once-upon-a-time Seattle Supersonics, and then the Mariners, whose claim to fame is that they somehow still exist.

There is a level of pride that comes with rooting for teams that never return the favor. It’s easy to root for the good teams. Anyone can do that. To stick with a team that, at its best, is a pristine still-life work of a stray dog-ravaged pile of garbage takes emotional energy, heart, determination, and grit. That is what the Mariners’ playoff-less streak represents. It’s the one thing the Mariners have provided to us, the ever loyal fanbase, over the better part of the last two decades

So what are we supposed to do with ourselves if the playoff-less streak ends in 2020, but the Mariners enter the October Classic looking like the 2005 San Diego Padres? Is the door really shutting on the playoff drought in whatever it is we want to call these past 60 games? The Mariners might make the playoffs because all somewhat-decent MLB teams in 2020 make the playoffs. On any given other year, however, the Mariners would be sitting at their customary 8-10 games back of the second wild card spot.

At its heart, for better and for worse, the playoff drought is the summary of the Mariners’ history. They were bad for a long time, good for a short time, very good for one year, and then bad again for the longest-active time. Therefore, this 2020 asterisk playoff run is more complicated than it deserves to be.

And of course, it should be noted that the Mariners are doing this in the most Mariners way possible. This conversation does not happen on any given normal year of baseball. The Mariners win enough games and make the playoffs, the drought is over, and the city erupts into fits of joy.

If the day comes that the Seattle Mariners are playing a game in the postseason for the first time in recent memory, I will erupt in a fit of joy. Of course I will. I don’t hate/love the Mariners, I love/hate them. Asterisk or no asterisk, a Mariners playoff appearance will upend a part of my fandom identity. I doubt I’m the only person struggling with that notion right now.