“We could very easily have won five of these games. Sometimes you get the big hit and sometimes you don’t, and we didn’t seem to get it. I thought we played fairly well even though we’ve lost five of six.”

Sit, children. Hush. Cup your ears to the wired tomato can. That tinny mouse sound in the metal, can you make out the words? It is the Voice of Second Place, the ponderous, post-game psychobabble of one Josepo Eliot Girardi, speaking in the language of the lost, rationalizing his fate like a closing-time drunk mulling one last shot for the road. 

We could very easily have won five of these games.

Yes, brothers and sisters, we have reached the fork in our journey where the driver stops the bus, admits the GPS is broken, the map is gone and that smoke in the air is not from campfires along the road, but the radiator. We may not get to Altoona, afterall. We might be staying here for a while. Everybody get comfortable.

We could very easily have won five of these games.

He's right, of course. Damn right. We could have very easily won five of those games. Very very easily.

The language of Kansas City.

I coulda been a contenduh... we wuz robbed... missed by that much...

Since we ditched the second-division teams who have stopped caring, we have lost 8 of 10.

We could easily have won five. And now we're talking like a 2-8 team.