Paging Professor Trelawney

One day, we'll look back on this season and laugh.

Well, all right, not laugh, precisely. I expect it will be more a failure to pull out our own hair while making weird little gasping noises in the backs of our throats than an actual laugh. But really, that's almost as good, considering.

We'll look back, and we won't render ourselves follicly challenged, and we'll say:

Hey, it wasn't all bad. April was fun. Also part of June. And that bit in September, remember that? That was excellent. And then we took the money we'd been saving for playoff tickets and we went to San Antonio in October and saw Sea World and the Alamo and when we accidentally left the tourist areas we even witnessed evolution in action. It was all very educational, and the scar's nearly gone, really.

Besides, that was the year Justin Morneau and Joe Mauer finally got their first full seasons in the majors, and look at them now. They needed that experience. It's kind of like prison, I think--once you've been there, you'll do whatever it takes not to go back. Except they didn't do anything wrong, of course, unless getting drafted counts.

Carlos Silva really matured that year, too. Oh, and wasn't it Jesse Crain's rookie season? I think it was. He's really something now, isn't he? I wish we hadn't traded him for Juan Gonzales in the offseason. That was the beginning of the end, my friends, not 2005!

That was the year we finally got rid of Luis Rivas, too. Remember him? Adequate glove, hit like the Queen Mother...post-embalming? Wonder where he is now. Actually, wait, no I don't.

Besides, no one remembers the 2005 Twins anymore. You say "2005" to a baseball fan, and all anyone talks about is how George Steinbrenner went into that irreversible coma due to an apoplectic fit after Derek Jeter's uniform pants ripped up the back seam on a play and the whole world got an eyeful of his lucky, lacy red thong. (And Jeter's much happier in San Francisco, so all's well that ends well.)

No, upon reflection, 2005 wasn't so bad. I mean, hey--at least we weren't the Royals!