Here’s B.J. Treuting, aka @BeardedNatitude, in his game day outfit.

/ Courtesy of B.J. Treuting

For the first time since 2012, B.J. Treuting is contemplating what his face would look like without a beard.

“I was getting my beard ready for the day, and this is the first time it’s ever hit me: that this literally could be one of the last times I do this,” Treuting says. “It kind of shook me a little bit to the core because it’s been such a huge part of me over the last seven years and you know, a lot of my notoriety is, ‘Oh, that’s the guy with the beard. Oh yeah, the Nats are never gonna win, he’s gonna have that thing forever.’ You know, now it’s four wins and [I could be a] totally, totally, totally different person.”

Treuting, better known to many Washington fans as @BeardedNatitude, proclaimed in 2012 that he wasn’t shaving his beard until the Nationals won the World Series.

“I was very, very confident that we would win that year,” he says. “Now, seven years later, here we are. And so I use oil, balm, shampoo, conditioner, I have a hair dryer just for my face. I used to make fun of, you know, girls taking an hour to get ready, and I absolutely, totally understand and I get it now.”

While he trims his mustache across his lip (“because having nine inches of hair covering my mouth would be absolutely miserable—you know, eating and drinking are a must,” he explains), he otherwise does not cut it. And now that the team is making its first-ever appearance in the championships, he is beginning to imagine a life without facial hair: “I probably need to get like a new driver’s license and all that because nobody’s gonna know who I am,” he says.

Superstitions are part of the DNA of sports, for players just as much as fans (if not more). The Nationals have been wearing their alternate navy blue uniforms for a long stretch of wins, including last night, even if they won’t talk about it. Outfielder Gerardo Parra has been rocking brightly colored sunglasses, a trend that other players have started picking up, because when he first wore them, the team won.

Indeed, even the team’s wholehearted adoption of the song “Baby Shark” stems from another Parra decision rooted in superstition. In the midst of a batting slump in June, the May pick-up for the Nats switched out his at-bat song for the children’s earworm. He got two hits that game, and the Nats won the series.

Since then, “Baby Shark” has stuck—the crowd goes wild when it plays in the stadium, and players make the shark chomping motions in celebration. The team blared the tune and danced in the clubhouse after winning the Wild Card game.

It’s precisely this bonhomie and sense of playfulness that all the fans we spoke to seemed to love most about this year’s Nats.

Sometimes, though, trying to adopt traditions like the playoff beard doesn’t quite work out. Team manager Dave Martinez accidentally shaved off his playoff beard right before the Wild Card game, when the guard came off his clipper. “I screwed up,” he told reporters, but the team still won from behind to secure their place in the postseason.

Unlike Martinez, Nats fan Linda Jemison has kept to restrictions on her hair during what, at least at the beginning of the season, felt like an improbable playoff run. (FiveThirtyEight gave the Nats a 6 percent chance of winning their division at the end of May.)

“I was supposed to get my haircut October 1, but I didn’t,” says Jemison, which was the same date as the Wild Card game. “Now I’m worried. What happens if I get my hair cut?”

Jemison is not leaving it to chance. In fact, she’s trying to secure victory by wearing the same shirt—a t-shirt that says “Juan Soto doing Juan Soto things,” after the electrifying 20-year-old outfielder—and her husband wears the same shirt, too. “Can we wash them?” she asks. “I don’t know.”

Among her many Nationals-based rituals, longtime Nationals fan Jennifer O’Dell wears what she calls her “magical drawers,” underwear that she dons “in order for them to win.” (Players have similar traditions, like slugger Jason Giambi’s golden thong, which he shared with some of his Yankee teammates last decade.)

O’Dell is a season ticket holder who describes herself as having “an unhealthy relationship with this team—I should probably seek therapy. It upsets me when I lose,” she says. “Finally this year, it feels like all of that worry, all of the sleepless nights, all of the pain, all of the stuff is finally coming together.”

Laura Shir, co-host of the “baseball podcast with a Nats bias” Resting Pitch Face, says that “baseball is such an emotional outlet for people, and then when it becomes too emotional, people need a coping mechanism for their emotional outlet.” That’s when they start, say, turning their hats inside out when the team is losing, or switching their shirts.

But for O’Dell, the Nationals’ success has served a different emotional purpose. She was diagnosed with invasive breast cancer last month, and “this has provided a really good distraction from some of my real-world bullshit,” she says. “I get to suspend disbelief for a bit and be in the moment of this historic playoffs. I feel like I’ve got half a million friends around here in the District, in the DMV, just like feeling the same way I do.”

And indeed she does. Like O’Dell, Treuting has a game day outfit that he wears, in addition to his long-standing beard. The get-up includes putting on the exact same socks in the exact same order, as well as shorts, a jersey, and a “Captain Obvious” t-shirt underneath. “It’s totally weird if it doesn’t work,” he says. “But oh my gosh—it’s working really, really well.”

That’s how Leor Newman sees it, too. He is from the D.C. area and was at the Nationals’ first-ever game at Nationals Park as a 13 year old. When first baseman Ryan Zimmerman hit a walk-off home run, “I was completely hooked,” he says.

For the wild card game, the team instructed fans to wear their best Nats red. Newman has one red jersey—from former outfielder Bryce Harper, who left D.C. for Philadelphia this season. So Newman decided to wear it with some key changes: he taped out part of Harper’s name and number 34, and wrote in starting pitcher Max Scherzer’s name and number 31. “I wanted to make it really silly,” he says.

After some major sports accounts retweeted pictures of Newman’s retooled jersey (“a bunch of random people were taking pictures of my back,” he notes), he heard some criticism that he’s either really cheap or really embittered about Harper. He says it has nothing to do with either of those things.

Every time Newman has worn it, the Nats have won. “The tape is starting to fall off so I had to safety pin it,” he says. “But I don’t want to change the tape.” (He is also sporting what he calls a “little playoff beard—my face is a little itchy, but we keep winning.”)

While Newman still has his Harper jersey, O’Dell says she burned hers “ritualistically” in a bonfire in the front yard.

Shir has thought a lot about why sports fans employs these kinds of rituals and superstitions.

“One of the things I would emphasize about Nats fans is the losses in the playoffs have not been normal losses, they’ve been these bizarre karmic occurrences that no amount of logic can account for,” she says. “In some ways, that’s just baseball, but just, karmic bizarreness. Our coping mechanism is to make these weird karmic supplications to the universe.”

Until this year, the team has never made it past the first round of the playoffs.

Who can forget when the Nats were up 6-0 after three innings against the Cardinals, in a game that would decide which team advanced to the National League Series Championships? By the eighth inning, the Nats still held the lead. But it was St. Louis who rallied to win the game at Nats Park.

Or when Washington faced the Chicago Cubs in another decisive Game 5 on home turf in 2017, a nearly five hour game that featured a Scherzer meltdown prompted by what appeared to be a botched call from the home plate umpire. Just brutal.

It was in 2017 that Shir began what has become a tradition for her: a pre-playoff game shrine to the players. The first one included what looked like a pentagram in a circle, with various elements to represent the different members of the team. Some of it was easy—she and a friend have a slew of memorabilia—but for the players whose jerseys they didn’t have, “it was a crazy exercise in free associations.”

That meant grill tongs for Zimmerman “because he’s the team dad,” Shir explains, and a postcard with a deer on it for outfielder Michael Taylor “because he looks like a deer in the headlights.”

Here is Laura Shir with her first playoff shrine to the Nationals in 2017, with then-Nats starting pitcher Gio González in the center. The brown and blue M&Ms represent pitcher Max Scherzer’s eyes, as she and a friend began embarking on what she describes as “crazy exercise in free associations.” Laura Shir

Shir became a die-hard Nats fan during her college years in D.C., after growing up in New England. While she had always liked the sport, Shir was turned off by the bitter rivalry between the Yankees and the Red Sox. When she was eight, she wore a Yankees hat and other kids grabbed it and threw it in the mud. Her takeaway? “Baseball is fun, but people are mean about it.”

She scored $6 tickets to Nats Park early in her college days, and went with a friend who “really loved the team and it was just infectious,” Shir says. “When somebody really loves a team and they try to share that with you, it comes through and it’s hard to resist that.”

Shir has since moved to Boston, and for her, making those shrines is a way to remain connected. “I am now a long-distance Nats fan, and one of the things I love so much about this team is the community,” she says. “Being away from that when we’ve got this historic run going on, that’s how I stay into it.”

Treuting is also now a fan from afar, much to his chagrin. He moved to New Orleans shortly after one of his favorite games of the season—July Fourth.

“I’m so happy, but it hurts a lot knowing that I’m not there because Nats Park is probably my favorite place in the world,” he says. “Definitely there’s a pretty big hole in my heart, knowing that I’ve been missing all of this. I’m literally just refreshing Twitter and Instagram and just like, ‘Please people, post, post, post those posts.'”

He just booked his plane to come back to D.C. for the World Series next week. “I’m flying Thursday and should be at Nats Park Friday, Saturday, and Sunday for the Washington Nationals to play in the World Series,” he says. “I can’t believe I said that.”

O’Dell has tickets to the World Series, too, even though it’s happening the same week she’s slated to begin chemotherapy treatment.

“I’m worried about how I’m going to feel, but the good news is it’s given me a lightness about all of this,” she says. “There’s something real calming and transformative and powerful about that about being part of a thing that isn’t about politics and it’s not about, you know, red or blue. I’m just so happy. But these fuckers better not lose now.”

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