Washington Nationals manager Dave Martinez celebrates after Game 4 of the baseball National League Championship Series against the St. Louis Cardinals Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2019.

Patrick Semansky / AP Photos

The Washington Nationals are heading to the World Series.

No, this isn’t a lucid dream—it’s real life, thanks to a group of athletes who, over the past five months, have developed a level of grit and chemistry that helped them stage one of the most staggering comebacks of the season and franchise history.

The Nationals beat the St. Louis Cardinals 7-4 in front of a hometown crowd Tuesday night in a four-game sweep of the National League Championship Series. They will face their American League counterpart—either the Houston Astros or the New York Yankees—in the World Series next week.

This is the farthest a Nationals ball club has advanced into the postseason since the franchise moved to Washington from Montreal in 2005. The last Washington baseball team to reach the World Series was the 1933 Washington Senators.

It’s been a remarkable season for the team, which, despite years of successful regular seasons, has been unable to advance past the first round of the playoffs.

It’s also been a remarkable time for Washington sports. Just last week, the Washington Mystics won their first-ever WNBA championship title. The Washington Capitals won their first Stanley Cup last year.

On May 28, the statistics forecasting site FiveThirtyEight gave the Nationals a 6 percent chance of winning their division. They had a losing record and seemed destined to mediocrity by their struggling bullpen and the defection of their star outfielder Bryce Harper to their division rival, the Philadelphia Phillies.

Now, FiveThirtyEight gives the Nats a 38 percent chance of winning their first-ever World Series.

After a deeply disappointing first month of the season, the team turned it around in late May under the leadership of manager Dave Martinez.

The team began to perform on the field, yes. But they also began to personally gel in a way that’s vital for any group of individuals that wants to see collective success over the course of an exhaustive 162-game season.

The silliness started in June, when the newly signed outfielder Gerardo Parra picked the viral children’s hit “Baby Shark” as his walkup song (a nod to his kids). The song has since become an earworm of an anthem for both the team and its fans.

Around the same time, Parra and pitcher Anibal Sanchez began to institute dugout dance parties to celebrate home runs. Players that went deep round the bases then return to shake their booties (quite literally) for their teammates.

Reliever Sean Doolittle remained devoted to the ball-and-hat-shaped cart that drives him from the bullpen to the pitchers’ mound. Fans dubbed 20-year-old outfielder Juan Soto, the team’s newly minted star, Childish Bambino. And through it all, a close-up photo of ace pitcher Max Scherzer’s eyes—one blue, one brown—hovered over center field.

Regardless of what happens in the World Series, it’s been a joy of a season for a fan base that’s finally beginning to see itself as part of a city of champions.

Games 1 and 2 of the best-of-seven MLB World Series will take place on October 22 and 23 in either Houston or New York, depending on the winner of the American League Championship Series. The series will return to Washington for game 3 on October 25.

This story originally appeared on WAMU.

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