I’ll do it. I’ll be the first to eat my words after spewing so much shit about the Phillies for the last five months. I’ll gobble up the vitriol and bile I vomited out of my gob this entire offseason with a soup ladle after this weekend and ask for more if it means an entire season of Bryce Harper bombs and Rhys Hoskins mother-fuckering opposing pitchers for DARING to accidentally hit him with a high and tight pitch.

I’ll let John Middleton shit in his toupee and wear it around as a beard for a week.

I don’t care.

For the first time in six seasons meaningful baseball was played at Citizens Bank Park, and it was electric. Sure, they played a few games here and there from 2013 to 2018, but they never actually MEANT anything. We never had any hope for those teams. Any meaningful series played in that span was always something like, “hey, if the Phillies sweep this series they’ll pull within six games of the second wild card spot!” and they’d promptly drop two of three.

This was absolute domination of the defending NL East champions. The Braves should be placed into the MLB’s concussion protocol after that absolute thumping. The ringing of the Liberty Bell after each home run was only drowned out by the ringing in their ears after each haymaker the Phillies landed to their skull.

We’re being ushered into another golden age of Phillies baseball after suffering through six years of dreck. We earned this upcoming summer and (hopefully) fall for our years of doling out hard-earned money to see Ryne Sandberg over-manage games and Domonic Brown disappoint literally EVERYONE he came in contact with.

Gone are the days of false hope, clinging to the scraps of glory days past and patchwork rosters with more question marks than The Riddler’s suits. We don’t have to suffer through Jonathan Papelbon grabbing his crotch and blowing the four meaningful save opportunities he was given in 2013 and 2014 combined. Darin Ruf is eating live octopus and duck eggs somewhere in the bowels of Korea instead of striking out 900 times a season. Kevin Sefcik Jr. or whoever the fuck was our bullpen “ace” circa 2014 isn’t here anymore to give up the go-ahead run in the 8th inning.

Ty Kelly, Brock Stassi, Freddy Galvis? Gone, gone, gone.

Jean Segura, Andrew McCutchen, Bryce Harper? Here, here, here and giving opposing pitchers serious bouts of PTSD.

Pete Mackanin was a silver fox with great lettuce, but not much else. Gabe Kapler is a chiseled Greek God who has so-far given up on the idea of treating his lineup like a poorly run fantasy baseball team whose owner quits paying attention by June. Sure it’s early, but I guarantee you won’t be seeing Harper or McCutchen being forced to pitch the 7th inning of a game the Phillies are losing by 10 to “save the bullpen.” He knows you can’t run a team that way, but when Luis Garcia is a key bullpen cog like he was in 2017 your options are limited.

Yes, I realize it can all go south quickly. Yes it’s just three games out of 162. Yes, we’re still just in the honeymoon phase of our relationship with Harper. Yes, it’s a long season and anything can happen, blah blah blah. But today, on April 1, 2019, can you honestly remember a more successful three-game series this franchise has played since 2012?

You can’t, because there weren’t many even worth remembering.

They sent fishes wrapped in Robinson Cano, Max Scherzer, and Ronald Acuna Jr. jerseys to the rest of the NL East after this weekend. They didn’t even bother to send one to the Marlins, because who cares about the Marlins?

It’s a Philadelphia message. It means the rest of the National League East sleeps with the fishes.