The World Series is over but not forgotten. The postmortems and ‘what ifs’ continue as Dodger fans can only seemingly lick their wounds and baseball pundits look for reasons why the Dodgers failed to come away as the victors. Oh yes, and the call of the past has resurfaced – “Wait until next year.”

For me and I know it is most likely blasphemy, I do not agree with Cy Young winner-to-be Clayton Kershaw and the iconic Tommy Lasorda that nothing else matters or has been achieved if a team loses the World Series. Let me not stick my toes in the shallow end of the pool but jump off the high diving board and suggest to two of the highest profile Dodgers that they are not just wrong but they are categorically wrong.

Clayton Kershaw: “There’s only one team that can succeed. There’s only one team that wins the last game, so that’s tough. I think once the dust settles and we go home, we can realize that we had a pretty amazing season and we finished in second place, which nobody cares about or remembers.”

Tommy was a bit more Tommy-like in his assessment of the situation when speaking to Dodger manager Dave Roberts: To quote the legendary skipper, “You haven’t done s— until you win tomorrow.”

Let me suggest to the two that they are wrong that nobody cares and Clayton is perhaps feeling sorry for himself.

First, just ask the other 28 MLB teams if they would have traded places with the Dodgers during the 2017 World Series marathon. I’m one of those guys that believes it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Getting to the World Series in a major accomplishment over a 162-game schedule and two post-season rounds before the World Series. Let me rephrase, getting to the World Series is almost an impossibility because of the unseen variables in play as a team winds its way through the toughest sports schedule in the world. Clayton Kershaw is aware of that.

Said Kershaw: “Who knows how many times I’m going to get to go to the World Series. I know more than anybody how hard it is to get there, so I’m definitely not taking this one for granted.”

Secondly, I consider myself to be a loyal and true Dodger fan by simply having invested 65 years of my life spending every spring, summer and fall following the team, first in Brooklyn and then in Los Angeles. As a fan I can only speak for myself when I say I would much sooner have lost the World Series than not have gotten there at all. The most recent World Series was a whole lot more fun than the previous 28. Again, speaking for myself, it represented just one more step to a ring. To me as a fan, competing in the World Series – win or lose – is always important.

It does matter to me that the Dodgers got to a World Series and lost. Sure, I cannot tell you off hand who lost the 2011 World Series. I can’t tell you who won it either because it wasn’t the Dodgers. Some suggest we don’t remember who lost a World Series. I can tell you without the help of Google that the Dodgers indeed lost in the World Series in 1952, 1953, 1956, 1966, 1974, 1977, 1978 and 2017. I can also tell anyone who asks to whom they lost in each of those years. Naturally, I do treasure the victories in 1955, 1959, 1963 (extra special), 1965, 1981, 1988 but will never forget the years in which the team came home empty handed because they were my Dodgers. By the way, because of the 2017 experience, I am slotting the Dodgers in for a repeat performance in the 2018 Fall Classic.

Thirdly, for many players I expect just getting there in October would have been a treasured gift. Many players like the venerable Ernie Banks never got that thrill. Do you suppose Ernie would have swapped places with the Dodgers in those eight losing years? My guess is he would have done so in a heartbeat to just experience the thrill of playing on the greatest baseball platform in the world.