At long last, nearly perfect Dodgers poised for Hollywood ending

When the Los Angeles Dodgers last won the World Series, in 1988, it was truly a Hollywood ending - a denouement made possible, as Vin Scully put it in Game 1, only by the impossible.

Much like Gene Hackman's "Hoosiers," or even "Happy Gilmore," the Dodgers weren't supposed to win. That year, they were pretty mediocre offensively, and it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that the Dodgers wouldn't make it out of the National League Championship Series alive. In 11 regular-season meetings against the New York Mets, after all, the Dodgers lost 10 times. But, miraculously, they did, practically abusing Orel Hershiser to do it, then needed just five games to dispatch the Oakland Athletics - a 104-win juggernaut with multiple Hall of Famers - in the World Series.

"Nobody thought we could win the division. Nobody thought we could beat the mighty Mets. Nobody thought we could beat the team that won 104 games. But we believed it," manager Tommy Lasorda said.

The realization, however, of that "impossible dream," to borrow another Scully quote, begat nightmares. The Dodgers haven't played a World Series game since that Game 5 triumph over Oakland nearly three decades ago, and their penchant for blowing it has metastasized in recent years, especially. Over the past few seasons, the only outcome more predictable than the Dodgers winning a division title was some other team - any other team - representing the National League in the World Series. Remember when they lost to the Mets in the 2015 NLDS? Lol.

At long last, though, the nightmare ended Thursday in Chicago. With an 11-1 thumping of the Cubs in Game 5 of the NLCS, the Dodgers won their first pennant in 29 years. For an outcome so assured, it was, as Clayton Kershaw suggested, cathartic.

"It feels good to hear 'World Series,'" Kershaw said after the game on TBS. "It's been a long time coming for this team. I'm kind of at a loss for words right now. I never thought in a million years I'd get to play in a World Series. I know we've got four more to go, and I'm excited about it, but right now it's tough to sink in."

Kershaw's disbelief is understandable, the function of so many frustrated postseason runs. Frankly, the Dodgers' long-awaited return to the World Series should be more difficult for everyone else to compute, too. But it isn't. That's how good they are.

As evidenced by their merciless October, in which they swept the Arizona Diamondbacks in the division series and faced one over the minimum, so to speak, in their best-of-seven battle with Chicago, the Dodgers don't expect to win so much as they guarantee it in 30 minutes or its free. If the Houston Astros, their potential opponent in the World Series, are the exemplar of the everything-must-go rebuild model, the Dodgers are a testament to how insanely terrifying a team with a top-notch baseball operations department and Warren Buffet money is. Because as much as their success is tied to guys like Kershaw, a massive talent with a proportionately massive contract, their proximity to a championship is equally attributable to Chris Taylor, a five-WAR player acquired last June in a ho-hum trade for Zach Lee, and Brandon Morrow, an oft-injured starter who signed for $1.25 million last winter and was repurposed into one of the game's elite relievers.

This team isn't just Andrew Friedman's magnum opus. It's a damn marvel of engineering. The only thing the Dodgers lack, truthfully, is a plausible explanation for how they lost 16 of 17 games during one curiously dreary late-season stretch. (Barring that stretch, this team may have had a case as the best ever. They might still).

So, in all likelihood, and with all due respect to the Astros and New York Yankees, the Dodgers are going to get that happy ending they've been waiting for since 1988 - the one Justin Turner, the NLCS co-MVP, watched unfold from his grandmother's house. This time, they really, truly deserve to ride off into the sunset as the credits roll. And though that reality, their naked superiority, may not make for as dramatic a finish as 1988, it's always a spectacle when demons are exorcised.

And, who knows, maybe they'll even make a movie about it, someday.