Usually hedging your bets is a good idea.

When you’re me, and you’ve got a favorite American League baseball team and a favorite National League baseball team, and both of them are in the playoffs, you think you’ll be happy when at least one of the teams make its League Championship Series. I’m happy, of course, that my childhood heroes, the New York Yankees, are in the ALCS after improbable victories three games in a row over the Cleveland Indians. A thing of glory, as a matter of fact. On the other side of things, however, there are my almost-equally-beloved Nats, my hometown (now) team, who’d had a great season and every chance in the world to make the NLCS. Just one more victory last night would have done it. Even if it took until the wee hours of this morning they needed just one more win.

And in epic Washington-failure fashion, it just did not happen.

Can’t say it wasn’t a great game last night (and this morning), but the result was one we’ve become all too accustomed to in the DMV. That sound you hear all across the area this morning is fans sleepily and angrily hitting their alarm clocks knowing they’re going to be late today, if they can make it in at all.

Usually hedging your bets is a good idea. Get a different meal than your wife gets in case one of them isn’t good. But this? The heartbreak last night is more like finding out one of your kids survived a plane crash. One of them. Following a sports team ain’t exactly life and death—I get it. But tell that to the thousands of crushed Nats fans across the area, fans who on top of all this have to endure the same pain and suffering from the Capitals every spring as well.

I find myself one step closer to finally admitting that the team of my youth is now overshadowed in my heart by my new hometown team. The Yankees are great anyway; the Nats need me. Like the Brooklyn Dodgers of old, they need me, and like said Dodgers we’re now waiting ’til next year. And is it better or worse that the Nats are actually good now? At least during the regular season. After decades of futility (many in which the city did not have a team at all) Washington baseball now is actually good, which somehow makes it all the more painful.

But before I go all in for the Nats…

O Yankees, O team of my youth, give me one more ride. Just once more. For CC, for Gardner, for Girardi, for John Sterling for God’s sake. One more time, just one more time.