The Keeper will tell you what happened. I'll tell you what's coming.
The team sheet is not yet written and we are already grieving it.
This is the particular cruelty of the withheld decision — it does not spare you the feeling, it only delays the fact. Right now, across the country, there are eleven names being whispered into pillows, scratched onto the backs of receipts, argued over in group chats that have gone quiet because everyone has said their piece twice and nothing has changed. We are all managing the same team. We are all managing ourselves.
I know this feeling. It sits just behind the sternum. It is not quite hope and it is not quite dread — it is the space between them, which is the worst space there is. You cannot grieve the thing that has not happened. You cannot celebrate the thing that is not confirmed. You can only wait, and while you wait, the weight of the decision migrates. It leaves the man in the dugout and it fills the air we are all breathing.
By the time the names appear, we will have mourned the players who are not in them already. We will have mourned in advance, quietly, without ceremony. The announcement will not be a relief. It will be a reckoning.
The held breath is not hope. It is pre-emptive grief with nowhere to go yet.
Miami will give it somewhere to go.