Comparative dates on which the Nationals notched their 32nd win, each season:
2012 - 6th June (54th match of season)
2005 - 7th June (58th match)
2011 - 15th June (68th match)
2006 - 18th June (71st match)
2010 - 21st June (71st match)
2007 - 24th June (75th match)
2008 - 27th June (81st match)
2009 - 28th July (100th match)
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TODAY WITH THE '05 OVERACHIEVERS: Thursday 6th June 2005 was an open date between home series - they had finished a sweep of the Marlins (!) the previous day, and were carrying an overall four-match winning streak into a weekend series against the Oakland A's.
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WHY THE '05 OVERACHIEVERS WERE SPECIAL: Sure it was fun staying on top of the NL East for so much of that time, entertaining serious thoughts of contention in a town that, apart from DC United, the already-defunct Freedom and the 1998 Caps Cup Final run, had seen so little of it for nearly a decade and a half. But what made that transplanted Expos team so special was more fundamental than that.
It was a time for the DC area to re-connect with a sport that had deserted the area a third of a century earlier, to re-make the acquaintance of the national pastime and what a day out at the ballpark could really mean. We had bits and pieces of it from time to time - the old-timers matches, Orioles exhibitions and the like - but here it was again for the first time since William Spong was one of Virginia's US Senators, the real thing, a full season of MLB matches that actually counted in the league tables, real days out at the ballpark again.
Maybe it wasn't perfect - I couldn't see the scoreboard from my rear-half-of-311 seat (TBSITH it emphatically wasn't), RFK could 'hold the heat well' (to use Casey Stengel's remark about old Busch Stadium), and there were the scheduling conflicts and grandstand re-orientations required due to the ground-sharing with DC United, along with running out of hot dog buns in the fourth inning at the 2005 home opener, starting a tradition that most of us would like to dispense with - but just having baseball back more than compensated. The stands shaking like they did in the Redskins' great days...Brad Wilkerson remarking about same (and how this never happened in empty Stade Olympique in Montreal)...fantastic turn-outs overall...staying in the playoff race right up to the next-to-last weekend of the season...a season for memory-making.
Nowadays Nats supporters have more precise concerns (is this team really a contender?)...but back in 2005 it was about simpler things, like just getting to enjoy live baseball again. The '05 Overachievers were, above all, all about a voyage of rediscovery that, for many of us, still resonates today.
...and this is written on 7th June 2012, seven years to the day after our living link with the '05 Overachievers, one Ryan Zimmerman, was selected fourth overall in the MLB First-Year-Player Draft.
