Like only a select few in these last 100 or so orbits of the sun, this is, in the purest expression of baseball history, the Summer of Cubs.

Cubs are crossing the plate, ruling the mound, and inflaming Midwestern fantasies in frequencies that appear little less than fateful. It's why 90 minutes before the first pitch of the middle game of the Cubs-Pirates series, the shirt your eyes were drawn to amid a river of Chicago baseball fashion was the one that read, simply, "It's Gonna Happen."

What's gonna happen, barring another almost wholly predictable baseball convulsion of hauntingly and sorrowfully legendary proportions, is that the Chicago Cubs are going to win the World Series for the first time since 1908. No team in baseball is better positioned for that ultimate outcome, but all of that didn't exactly fit on Nancy Ward's shirt.

"This is the year," she said flatly, right there on General Robinson Street. "It's gonna happen."

I asked her how long she'd been a Cubs fan, a couple thousand of whom swelled the North Side audience hard toward a decent baseball turnout last night.

"Well, I'm 72," she said, "So, 50 years."

You have to wonder, really, who Nancy Ward thinks she is anyhoo, waiting around a mere 50 years for the Cubs to win a World Series when everybody knows it takes at least a century. Plenty of feverish Wrigley denizens from her parents' generation wound up having to put their I WUBS DA CUBS T-shirts into their last wills and testaments without any World Series ticket stubs to accompany them.

"There's just a general feeling about this team," said Nancy's daughter Kim, whose Mother's Day gift for Nancy was this trip to Pittsburgh to follow the best team in baseball. "This team has just jelled. Every night there's a different star. One night it's Geo[vany Soto, the fine rookie catcher], the next it's [Mark] DeRo[sa, the second baseman who is closing in on 80 RBIs]."

(I trust I've correctly translated Kim's contemporary verbal shorthand, even as I've never been really into the whole A-Rod, K-Rod, K-Fed, J-Lo Man-Ram, J-Roll, P-Diddy thing.)

Anyway, the Wards, from the Chicago suburb of Lombard, Ill., said they've had a great trip this week, even taking some time Monday to visit the Titanic Artifact Exhibition at the Carnegie Science Center's SportsWorks venue. It would have been impolite at that point to mention that the last time the Cubs won the World Series, the Titanic itself had not been built. The shipyard in Belfast didn't even have the specs until 1909, the summer after historic hurlers Mordecai Brown (M-Bro) and Orval Overall (O-Ove) pitched the Cubs past the Detroit Tigers in five games in the Fall Classic Before It Was Even Known As Such.

As it happens, the impetus for this Pittsburgh trip would have been just as legitimate in 1908, but barely. Mother's Day had just been invented three months earlier, along with the Model T Ford.

Honest to God.

So you see what kind of courage it takes to wear a shirt that says "It's Gonna Happen."

"It used to be the Cubs would get behind in the first inning, and we'd think, 'Ah, we're gonna lose,' " Nancy said. "Now we don't think that way when we're down and there are two out in the ninth."

Thus there was little consternation over that three-spot the Pirates put on Carlos Zambrano in the first last night. The Cubs were back in front by the middle of the fourth with the exact blend of patient and simultaneously aggressive hitting they've used to push across more than 700 runs this summer.

The Cubs have not only won more than anyone in 2008, they've clubbed people like nobody else.

Chicago came into the game last night at a plus 184 in run differential. No other team was better than plus 111. Not bad for a team that still wins primarily with pitching.

Prior to the typically episodic blast of Zambrano skittishness last night, the Cubs had held opponents to two runs or fewer in 10 of the previous 14 games stretching back to Aug. 10.

"This team just seems to fit together better than any team I can remember," said Kim, who has been a season-ticket holder at Wrigley Field since the early '90s. "Hiring [manager] Lou [Piniella] was one of the best moves they ever made."

Giving him $118 million worth of talent didn't hurt, either, but I sure wouldn't disagree with anything the Wards are saying.

In 1969, 1984, 1989, 1998, and 2003, the Cubs had teams that might have inspired widespread wearings of the "It's Gonna Happen" line, and in any or all of those years, my first reaction would have been, "No It Ain't."

But even with their accidental tortured history, this Cubs team is a lot harder to dismiss. Somewhere in October, long after this estival romance, don't be surprised if there's an end to the Hundred Years Snore.