EXTRA: Back to 'Wait 'til next year?'

Are we back to flying the 'L' flag?

The dreams of Chicago Cubs ball clubs capable of winning championships in two consecutive seasons are now down the toilet -- the Cubs' 11-1 loss Thursday ensured the Los Angeles Dodgers will be the National League champions for 2017 and will go to the World Series beginning Tuesday.

It's a low blow to those Cubbie fanatics who were delusional enough to think their fave ball club is now among the league elite and was somehow entitled to a second-straight World Series appearance.

ALTHOUGH IT REALLY shouldn't be. Winning two straight championships in professional athletics is difficult. There are a lot of teams that would consider winning one championship (the way the Cubs did in 2016) to be significant. Nothing takes away that accomplishment.

It will be curious to see now the Cubbie faithful react to losing. Will they become obnoxious in their whining that somehow they were entitled to victory in 2017? Such arrogance is considered tacky when it comes from New York Yankees fans, but then again, the Yankees back up such talk with winning ways.

What I don't see is something along the lines of Bill Veeck during the 1940s stint that he owned the Cleveland Indians. He had them when they won their last (to this date) World Series ever in 1948, and when it became mathematically impossible for the Indians to repeat as champions in 1949, he conducted a ceremony in which he buried the World Series championship banner the Indians had flown that season.

Implying that the championship days were over, and it was time to focus on the future.

WHICH TO THIS date are still World Series-title-less -- to the point where I'm sure Cleveland baseball fans would be thankful to have come as close as the Cubs did this year to repeating (rather than losing to the Yankees in the Division Series round of this year's playoffs). Or Pittsburgh Pirates fans who made playoff appearances, but have been unable to break their own streak of four decades without a championship.

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What I'm more inclined to expect is Cubbie fan whining along the lines of how 2016 is supposed to live on forever -- and how 2005 (the year the Chicago White Sox won this city's first World Series title in this century) is a year to be forgotten.

It will be this obnoxious attitude that will fuel the dislike that fans of Chicago's two ball clubs have for each other.

And could be the impetus of what could become an ultimate World Series, from the Chicago perspective -- a rebuilt White Sox with a Cuban connection at its core against the Cubs, perhaps by 2019. Which would be the centennial of that World Series that lives in Chicago baseball infamy and is in desperate need of erasure.

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