(SportsRadio 610) -- You probably don’t understand it fully just yet.
But try.
What you’ve enjoyed the last five years is historic and remarkable. And you may be my age before you experience anything like it again.
It was a team like these Astros that turned me into a huge baseball fan. It was the Oakland A’s. It started in 1971, when I was 9 years old.
They were unlike any other team in baseball, with a colorful owner in Charley O’Finley. They had bright uniforms, big personalities, wild hair and collectively were cut from an entirely different cloth.
Reggie Jackson, Vida Blue, Catfish Hunter, Rollie Fingers, Sal Bando, Bert Campaneris, Sal Bando. I still can name most of the roster off the top of my head, because that team immersed me into this wonderful world of baseball.
Baseball never had seen anything like them before. I followed every game via box scores in the newspaper (Google it) and watched them on the Saturday Game Of The Week on NBC. Back then, there was no cable or 5G (again, Google) and games were difficult to watch live outside of the playoffs and World Series.
I became an Astros fan, a huge Astros fan, in middle- and high school because our family annually would pile into our station wagon (also on Google) and spend one day at Astroworld and one day at the Astrodome to watch an Astros game.
That was roughly 50 years ago. It also was the last time any team did what the Astros now have done. Five straight American League Championship Series appearances.
These Astros, too, are a colorful group cut from a different cloth. They wear bright uniforms, with big personalities, wild hair and are unlike any other team in the game.
The message is this: It may be 50 years before you ever again see anything like what the Astros have done.
It may be never.
So try to understand that win-or-lose from here on out, you are watching history.
You are watching one of the greatest teams in the history of the game. You are watching something in your childhood that always will make you a kid at heart.
You probably don't even have a girlfriend yet, much less a wife, kids of your own and decades of real life under your belt. But this is a part of your life that will stay with you forever.
Enjoy every second.
For those of us enjoying it a second time, it just gets better the second time around.
John P. Lopez is co-host of In The Loop, weekdays on SportsRadio 610 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Lopez has covered Houston sports for more than 30 years as a reporter, columnist and radio host. He's also authored or co-authored four books, including "My Life In The Fast Lane, with former NFL star Dan Pastorini."