For sports fans in Atlanta, expectations hardly exist. Atlanta is the plucky underdog. The highlight factory. The talented underachiever. What it is not, is a winner — at least it hasn’t been since Major League Baseball’s Atlanta Braves won the city’s lone championship in the midst of 14-straight division titles in the 1990s and 2000s.
That championship arrived in 1995. I remember it well, despite being an 8-year-old kid who’d only recently moved to Atlanta. When Marquis Grissom tracked a lazy fly ball to secure the final out in Game 6 against the Cleveland Indians, our watch party spontaneously darted outside to shoot fireworks.