Sam Hinkie is back, and the cool chill you are feeling is the shade he just cast on all the doubters and haters.

He hasn’t tweeted in 56 days (not that I’m counting). So this Tweet, today, about the Houston Astros’ process marks the first missive from the master since the Sixers season began. It’s a good one:

He links to a recent SI.com article detailing the Astros’ plan to bottom out and rebuild, among some familiar highlights:

“When you’re in 2017, you don’t really care that much about whether you lost 98 or 107 in 2012,” Luhnow said back then. “You care about how close we are to winning a championship in 2017.” In other words, they were entirely focused on several years down the line, which meant shedding every one of their expensive assets and starting from scratch. People hated it.

Still, a few days later I flew back to New York with the makings of a 5,000-word story that would appear in the June 24 issue Sports Illustrated, with a bold cover line: YOUR 2017 WORLD SERIES CHAMPS featuring the sorry Astros. SI’s editor Chris Stone and I, along with baseball editor Emma Span, had consulted on the proper year to choose. We settled on 2017 because the Astros’ young nucleus would by then be reaching its prime, because it seemed to more or less hew to the front office’s own timeline—which, they promised, would eventually include a payroll hike—and because three years, in baseball, is actually not the blink of an eye.

But many people, including some within our own office, hated the cover, too. Even the club’s own hometown paper, the Houston Chronicle, called it “more of an attention-grabbing, perhaps even tongue-in-cheek projection than a prediction.”

It was certainly a long shot, but so is everything in baseball. Vegas usually assigns a given season’s spring favorite less than a 20% chance of winning that fall’s World Series. What it wasn’t was empty clickbait, or a hot take. While we’re never above generating interesting conversations, my editors and I genuinely believed that what I saw down in Houston could result in a ring in three seasons. Now, the Astros are four games away from coming through on that prediction.

That, sounds familiar.

Hinkie has grown a beard and may be crawling around a Stanford lecture hall. A small part of me thinks the Sixers should embrace his cult hero status and acknowledge him in some way when and if this thing ever really hits its stride. I don’t think they will, partly because I don’t think there was much love less, and I suspect the letter really ruffled some feathers. But, there’s no denying he made some very specific moves besides just being bad that allowed the Sixers to be in the position in which they currently find themselves. Everyone loves it when a plan comes together.

There should be a shirt for that.

Get one.