The trade of Juan Soto on Tuesday marked perhaps the most difficult day in the history of the Washington Nationals.

That afternoon, the 23-year-old transcendent superstar who helped lead the Nats to a championship less than three years ago was sent to San Diego for a bushel of prospects and an uncertain future. The reasons the team felt they had to make this trade now are complex and rooted in debatable economics.

What is clear, though, is that it has left many D.C. sports fans heartbroken.

“When I got back from camp, I went to my room for a whole minute and started to cry,” 10-year-old Sam Tomblin told DCist/WAMU as he waited for the train in Alexandria with his dad to head to Tuesday’s night game. He wore a baseball mitt and a Soto jersey.

Northern Virginia resident Carol Quin didn’t shed tears when she got news of the trade. She did, however, text several unprintable words to her “Bad Ass Baseball Babes” group chat.

“There were curse words flying on our text messages,” Quin said, as she stood inside the ballpark barely two hours after Soto’s departure from D.C. became official.

“I think it’s going to be a while before we come back,” Quin sighed. “It’s going to be a long rebuild.”

Jorge Rosa of Vienna walked the concourse at the ballpark still sporting his Soto jersey. He didn’t fault the superstar for wanting what he’s worth and wondered why the team just didn’t give it to him.

“[Soto] is a great guy, a great player…he’s worth every nickel he’s going to get,” said Rosa. “And the Nats didn’t pay him.”

Others expressed dismay and anger at letting the situation get to this point.

“It’s horrible. It’s horrible,” said Justin Shepherd of Columbia Heights, who was with his son, 11-year-old Sebastian, outside of the center field gate. “If [the team thinks] they made a good decision trading Juan Soto so they can be good again in three years, then… they’ve been making poor decisions the last several years to prepare for this moment.”

“We traded Soto and [Josh] Bell. We are the worst team in the league,” said Tom Merritt of Chevy Chase, who was at the game wearing a paper bag on his head. His bag-wearing friend Patrick Henry chimed in, “We also traded Scherzer and Turner [last year]. When is it going to end?”

It was only 2 years, 9 months, and several days ago when Nats fans’ tears were ones of joy and those curses were punctuating celebratory cheers.

In 2019, the Washington Nationals won the freaking World Series, capping off nearly a decade of constantly competitive, star-laden, and winning baseball. But that era is now officially and unceremoniously over with the trade of one of the last players who helped make it happen.

The Washington Nationals’ rise from its arrival from Montreal in 2005 to a championship-winning team embraced by the city was gradual and glorious. The quick fall, though, has hit much harder than a home run off Juan Soto’s bat.

The first few years were a bit rough, with the racing presidents often being the biggest attraction at games, but fortunes started turning around in 2009 when the Nationals selected pitcher Stephen Strasburg in the MLB draft. The next year, they picked Bryce Harper and signed the team’s first true star, Jayson Werth.

In 2012, the Nats won the division, and then gave their growing cadre of devoted fans their first taste of heartbreak when they epically melted down against the St. Louis Cardinals in the playoffs.

The Nats would go to the playoffs three out of the next five seasons, falling short each time, sometimes in dramatic and wrenching fashion. There was a sense that there might be a curse on the franchise, maybe because Teddy never won the presidents’ race.

Then fans got a new hero in late 2018, when a charismatic teenager from the Dominican Republic came up from the minors with power and a batting eye that the game had rarely seen. His name was Juan Soto, and he hit a three-run homer during his first start at Nationals Park, becoming the first teenager to hit a home run in an MLB game since Harper. Those in the crowd at the otherwise sleepy weekday afternoon game went wild.

Soto finished second in the rookie of the year voting in 2018, but it was in 2019 when he became a D.C. legend.

Every local sports fan knows the tale of the 2019 team. Starting off with 19 wins and 31 losses, the “Stay in the Fight” mantra, Baby Shark, Soto’s game-saving hit in the Wild Card game, sweeping St. Louis to exorcize the curse of Teddy, Ryan Zimmerman’s and Soto’s World Series homers, the dominance of Strasburg, Howie Kendrick’s Game 7 foul pole blast, and, finally, the first World Series championship for Washington, D.C. in more than 80 years.

In the middle of it all, smiling and shuffling his feet in the batter’s box, was Soto.

“He became a folk hero in this city,” said Jesse Dougherty, who covers the Nats for the Washington Post and also wrote a book about the championship season. “All of those things combined made him this outsized, larger-than-life figure here.”

It’s hard to know if the pandemic-shortened, fanless 2020 season that followed the win accelerated the Nats’ fall. There was no victory lap and no full season as defending champs, only locked gates and a smattering of claps. While this was the case for every team, the fallout may have been a bit more acute for the Nats considering what they had just accomplished the year before.

“A team coming off a World Series like that with a lot of momentum, and hoping to set attendance records the next season… the Nationals missed out on a lot of that,” said Dougherty. “I think that could have had a material effect on the franchise’s arc.”

Fans were back for a truncated 2021 season, and even as so many of his championship teammates got injured, retired or were traded, Soto remained. Even in this current abominable season, he was a player very much worth coming to the ballpark to watch even if the team was losing.

At 23 years old, a superstar, and now the unquestioned leader of the franchise, Soto was the Nats’ future. That was until Tuesday.

Beyond an underperforming roster that wasn’t likely to get much better in the near term, there are probably many other reasons that went into the decision to trade Soto.

Soto rejecting an extension offer was certainly one of them, but he was still under contract to be a National until after the 2024 season. The potential sale of the team by the current owners, the Lerner family, also probably played into the decision-making. It’s very possible that fans won’t know all the factors until much further down the line, if ever.

Whatever happened and why the Nats’ future very quickly became the past, the present remains the same. Soto is in San Diego and Washington has a lot of new players that may or may not become the next face of the franchise in several years’ time.

But baseball is funny. No matter what is happening off the field, the games still need to be played on it. Every game brings a chance to win — and with winning, comes hope.

Hours after Soto was traded — as stadium workers were still scrambling to remove Soto’s photo from a lineup display near the center field gate — the Nationals won a baseball game. They defeated the first-place New York Mets, 5-1.

When asked if they think the Nationals will win the World Series again, many fans let their hope shine through. (Washington sports fans are, notoriously, gluttons for punishment when it comes to such optimism.)

“It’s not like we haven’t been in this boat before,” Quin quipped, tugging on her Nats hat. “We will see.”

Said Rosa: “I’m still hopeful. That’s why I come back.”

As the train pulled into the station to take him to Tuesday’s game, 10-year-old Sam was still processing, but managed a half-hearted bit of optimism. “Not soon,” he said of the Nationals’ World Series hopes. “Maybe.”