By Bob Markus

Next year could be here at last. Wait until next year has long been the rallying cry of diehard Cubs' fans. They've been saying it for 100 years. I used to be one of them. For nearly 70 years, ever since I was old enough to say "Stan Hack" or "Bill Nicholson," I was a Cubs' fan. I believed in next year. I thought 1969 was next year, but then, perhaps the best Cubs team ever--there are three Hall of Famers from that team and Ron Santo should be a fourth--blew an 8 1/2 game lead in September. Next year seemed a long way off then, but 15 years later, in 1984 , a year that turned out to be more horrible than George Orwell ever could have imagined, the long wait appeared to be over. The Cubs had a 2-0 lead over the San Diego Padres in the National League championship series and no team had ever lost under those circumstances. Of course, the Cubs had never been in the championship series before. A Steve Garvey walkoff homer in Game Four, a ground ball through the wicket of first baseman Leon Durham in Game Five and it was. . . . .drumroll please. . . .WAIT TIL NEXT YEAR!

The next years kept coming. 1989. Mark Grace bats .647 for the Cubs but Jack Clark hits at a .650 clip for the San Francisco Giants, who win the series , 4-1. Footnote to history: Had the Cubs won that series, the third game of the World Series would have been played on schedule in Wrigley Field and the earthquake that rocked San Francisco minutes before the scheduled game would have been a local event, not the national sensation it became. 2003. Surely this was the next year we Cubs fans had so long awaited. Leading the Florida Marlins three games to one, just one more win away from their first world series appearance in 58 years, and ....aw, what the heck, you know what happened next. The Cubs didn't even have the grace to take the blame for that choke job. Instead a fan named Steve Bartman took the fall even though there wasn't a chance in hell Moises Alou would have caught the foul ball that Bartman "stole" from him. I should have known right then that next year was just a myth, no more real than the Easter bunny, but against all the evidence I still believed.

Then came last October's shameful three-game meltdown against the Los Angeles Dodgers in a series the Cubs were favored to win. There were no redeeming moments for the Cubs in that series, not one. At long last, as a onetime copy desk colleague at the Chicago Tribune used to say, the scales fell from my eyes. There is no next year. But wait a minute. I think next year might be here, after all. Not for the Cubs, but for my new favorite team, the Florida Marlins. Ever since I moved to South Florida in 1998, I've followed the Marlins, rooting for them--except when they played the Cubs. Now they have my absolute loyalty. Unlike the underachieing Cubs, the Marlins have a habit of playing beyond their supposed capabilities. This was apparent to me long before they got off to an 11-1 start this season, winning the last three games in that streak after trailing in the ninth inning each time. No team in baseball history had done that in a three-game series and so what if it was against the Washington Nationals.

The Marlins have been confounding the experts for years. They've won two world championships in the last dozen years without ever winning a division title. They are the only team in major league history that has never lost a playoff series. Of course, it's way too early to predict the Marlins will make the playoffs this year, but if they do, put your money on them. And they have a chance. Their five-man rotation, once Andrew Miller gets healthy, is among the best in baseball, although few outside the state of Florida could name even one of them. In shortstop Hanley Ramirez they have a true super star and second baseman Dan Uggla, whose name pretty well reflects the way he plays defense, is nevertheless a clutch hitter sho regularly bangs out 30 homers and 90 r.b.i.s. They have an outfield featuring three center fielders. One of them, Cameron Maybin, who came from the Tigers in the Miguel Cabrera-Dontrelle Willis trade, has yet to hit his stride, but he will. All the baseball scouts say so. Jeremy Hermida, who was Cameron Maybin before there was a Cameron Maybin, is finally showing what all the fuss was about. In one of those comeback wins in Washington last week-end Hermida tied the game in the ninth with a two-run homer and won it in the 11th with a three-run blast. The third outfielder, Cody Ross tied Sunday's game with an eighth inning homer, then, after the Marlins fell behind by a run going into the ninth, doubled in the decisive three runs in a 7-4 victory.

I've been aware of the Marlins since before they played their first game. I covered their organizational meeting and interviewed owner Wayne Huizenga before they made Catcher Charles Johnson their first draft pick, before Charlie Hough pitched them to a victory in their first game in 1993, before they traded future Hall-of-Fame reliever Trevor Hoffman for outfielder Gary Sheffield a few weeks later. Since then, stars have come and quickly gone, and fans, who came in droves that first season, have mostly only gone. In a way you can't blame them. The team has gone through three ownerships in its relatively brief existence. After each of its world championship seasons there has been a fire sale of top players. Huizenga's dismantling job after the 1997 World Series win was particularly brutal and the following year the team lost 108 games and most of its fandom. It also lost manager Jim Leyland, who I've known ever since he first stepped onto a major league field with the Chicago White Sox. He was the third base coach for Manager Tony LaRussa and quickly endeared himself to the Chicago media. Third base coaches usually fly under the radar unless they do something wrong. In one of his first games with the White Sox, Leyland sent a runner home to almost certain death and the Sox lost the game by a run . Afterwards, Leyland manned up and admitted he made a mistake. After that he could do no wrong and in fact did very little wrong through the years. So I was rooting for the Marlins when they won under Leyland in 1997.

When the Marlins won again in 2003, of course, I was rooting for the Cubs. Now, I still follow the Cubs on their cable network and usually go to at least one game when I go back to Chicago in the summer. But my passion for them has turned cold, cold as a January day on Michigan avenue. I'm a Marlins fan, now, baby, and I think I've finally got a chance to see next year. Maybe it won't be this year, but next year. . . . .go Marlins.