After 21 long years, the Seattle Mariners are back in the playoffs. Savor the moment

Twenty-one years is a long time.

Twenty-one years is how long Mariners fans — the longest- suffering fans in North American sports — waited for the moment that arrived Friday evening.

It was almost exactly 9:30 p.m. when the champagne popped across the Puget Sound region. Or was it microbrews and tallboys of Rainiers being cracked? It hardly mattered. With a 9th inning win against the Oakland Athletics, a fanbase accustomed to disappointment was finally allowed to exhale and erupt in a celebration pent up since George W. Bush’s first term in office. There was pitch-perfect flashbulb drama at the end, because of course there was, thanks to a two-out, game-winning home run to right field off the bat of pinch hitter Cal Raleigh. If Junior rounding third in 1995 is the high-water mark. this, after so many years, wasn’t bad either.

The drought is over.

The world has changed so much since the last time the Mariners entered postseason play. In some ways, life then is almost unrecognizable now. In 2001, iTunes had just launched and the first iPod was released. For most of the year, Sept. 11 was just another date on the calendar — until the moment it wasn’t. We were children then.

But, at least for fans of a certain vintage, 2001 wasn’t so long ago that the memories have faded. It was Ichiro’s first year in Seattle, and watching the Japanese phenom play the game, and redefine the game day in and day out easily captured the imagination. Under the mantra of “Two outs, so what?” — and under the management of the endearingly cranky Lou Piniella — an unlikely cast of characters sliced through the competition on the team’s way to a record-tying 116 regular season wins. Players like John Olerud, Mike Cameron, Bret Boone, Carlos Guillen and Mark McLemore won over hearts, while fan favorites like Dan Wilson, Edgar Martinez and even Jay Buhner — who spent most of the year injured, only to return late in the season to knock a couple more out of the park before calling it a career — further cemented their legacies in Seattle. On a pitching staff that featured a young Freddy Garcia, an old Jamie Moyer and the split-finger fastball throwing Kazuhiro Sasaki, everyone did their part. The team made it look easy.

It was a magical season — a season that made postseason glory feel inevitable — until the magic suddenly disappeared. Over the course of five dreary games with the Yankees in the American League Championship, the 2001 Mariners went from one of the greatest teams of all time to the top of the what-could-have-been pile. If wins and titles are all that matter, then, ultimately, the M’s fell short.

That’s not how we remember it here in the Pacific Northwest though, is it? We don’t look back on 2001 with disappointment. It’s not a sore spot, 21 years later, and there’s a lesson in that. The season that wasn’t still LIVES fondly in our hearts for the lasting memories it created: the thrilling victories, the long, warm summer nights, the sound of Dave Niehaus on the call, the feeling that baseball greatness, in Seattle of all places, was possible.

Thinking about that 2001 Mariners team this week, it’s those things that come to mind, not the bitter losses at the end. The season — like all great baseball seasons, perhaps because the daily grind of the sport perfectly lends itself to creating senses of time and place — brings to mind so many other mile markers in my life. I worked the night shift at a lumberyard in the barren, industrial Kent valley, driving a forklift, and we would set up a radio so the games would play over the intercom, never missing a pitch. The 2001 season was also the last my mom would see. The following spring an aneurysm stole her away.

Now, with this Mariners team, a new generation is finally able to make its own lasting memories and its own touchstone moments. Someday we’ll be able to look back on the year a fresh cast of unlikely heroes was born, on the year Julio Rodriguez emerged, on the year Mitch Haniger made good on his promise, on the year the drought finally ended — and all those snapshots will live as long as we choose to hold onto them

If the 2001 Mariners — and the two decades that have passed since then — taught us anything, it’s to appreciate the moment for what it is. The future holds no guarantees.

If the joy is in the journey, this has already been one hell of a ride — and it’s not over yet.