It's been so long, I can barely remember how this feels.

Fourteen years ago, I watched the most memorable baseball game of my life when the Phillies' Mitch Williams struck out Bill Pecota swinging at a high fastball to send my first love to the World Series for the first time in 10 years.

Yesterday, the Phillies' Brett Myers struck out the National's Wily Mo Pena with a 12-to-6 curveball -- a pitch which drops top to bottom like the numbers on a clock -- to send my first love to the playoffs for the first time in 14 years.

Each time, it's been worth the wait. My strained vocal cords and shaking hands might beg to differ, but I haven't felt this good in a long time. The Phillies are going to the playoffs. I can't believe it.

The Phillies are going to the playoffs.

September is always a month of hope, with a new school year and football season beginning.

But for the Phillies and their fans, it's always been a month of stress.

For five of the past six seasons, it seemed the team would bring its best in September only to falter in the last week of the season. Somehow, it's been harder than finishing way out of the playoffs, like the team did from 1994 through 2000.

But today, none of that matters. Today, the Phillies are champions of the National League East, patchwork pitching staff and all.

People can talk about how sports don't matter, that the athletes are overpaid and that it might be pathetic to derive happiness from the successes of 25 men I've never met. In fact, within 15 minutes of the game's end yesterday, one of my best friends told me to "get over it."

He just doesn't get it.

The Phillies are my family. I've grown up with them, pretending to be great third basemen like Mike Schmidt or Scott Rolen, in a park down the street.

The most cherished moments I have with my parents are from that game 14 years ago, jumping as high as we could when Pecota swung and missed.

And after the game yesterday, the first person I talked to was my dad.

My parents, usually pessimistic Phils fans, were caught entirely unprepared for a division title.
So to celebrate, my dad rummaged through some cabinets and pulled out a champagne bottle left over from last Christmas.

I wish I could have been there to have a glass of it.

See, Philadelphia hasn't had much to root for, even outside of sports.

The Phillies have been sort of a microcosm of the city, having lost their 10,000th game in franchise history in the same year as the city's all-time high for homicides and at a time when historically corrupt local politics have arguably been at their worst.

The Phillies are lovable losers, and this year they're uniting a city that has learned to live with losing. The Athletics, once a Philadelphia baseball team, were the champs of the city.

Naturally, we got stuck with the Phils.

But they're our family.

And even though I'm in State College, I still have my family. Right now, strangers I will never meet again will be my best friends, all because a baseball team unites us.

Even if the Phils get swept in the first round of the playoffs, they're still the National League East champions, better than the collapsing Mets and the pesky Braves and the spoiled Marlins.

It's hard to be a Philadelphia sports fan, but that's even truer at Penn State, where the Steelers are five-time Super Bowl champions and the Eagles have fallen short each of the past 47 years.

I guess I still don't know what it's like to root for a champion, but today, for the first October in 14 years, the Fightin' Phils have a chance to show me.

Kevin Doran is a senior majoring in media studies and is the Venues editor for The Daily Collegian. His e-mail is kad952@psu.edu.