Art Thiel is a longtime sports columnist in Seattle, for many years at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and now as founding editor at SportsPressNW.com.
Many sports fans indulge the reverie that teams most of the time share an overarching camaraderie and purpose. That's often true. But it's just about as often that managers and laborers would be thrilled to step out into the street and settle things.
Two things prioritize what seems the mandatory minimum for sustained offensive success these days in a business with both high personnel turnover and a ruthless consumer demand for instant gratification (making it identical to nearly every other aspect of 21st-century life).
It will be a match with stakes beyond the rivalry, featuring teams on an uptick that accept the frozen darkness of the Palouse as a proper FOX Sports theater for proving they can get as metaphorically dirty as everyone else in college ball and come out ahead.
The excruciating 21-year wait to return to the postseason ended in an even more excruciating manner -- a six-hour, 22-minute molar-grinder against the American League's best team that had enough shoulda-woulda-coulda to displace all the water in Puget Sound.
Fourteen years to .500, 21 years between playoffs. If you are a non-baseball fan, look upon your overwrought Mariners-loving friends and family with compassion.