ATLANTA - Dansby Swanson knows. He knows more than any other Atlanta Brave, even more than fellow Big Peach native Austin Riley - if only because the 24-year-old Riley is three years younger than Swanson - what it's like to have your heart ripped apart time and time again by Atlanta sports teams, especially the Bravos.
"Just being here, understanding what the sports culture is like here," said Swanson a few hours before he would score the winning run in the bottom of the ninth late Sunday night to make Atlanta a 5-4 winner over the Dodgers and secure a 2-0 lead in the best-of-seven National League Championship Series.
"Understanding how invested people are and ultimately kind of how this city has fallen short a lot of times, has led to a lot of frustration."
Oh, do we all know the frustration of what it's like to root for the Braves, the NFL Falcons, the NBA Hawks. Even the Georgia Bulldogs, though Swanson probably doesn't emotionally share in those Dawgee Downers since he went to Vanderbilt, where he won an NCAA baseball title.
Still, Swanson remembers the Falcons leading the Patriots 28-3 in the Super Bowl only to lose. He may not be old enough to remember the Yankees' Jim Leyritz homering at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium to turn around the 1996 World Series but he's surely heard about it. And he lived last year's NLCS loss to these same Dodgers after the Braves led the series 3-1 only to drop the last three in a row.
"I'm an Atlanta lifer," he said. "I know what it's like."
But he also knows he's seeing a change in some corners, beginning with last spring's deep playoff run by the Atlanta Hawks, who stubbornly fell to eventual world champion Milwaukee in the Eastern Conference finals.
"We were in New York earlier this year when the Hawks were playing the Knicks (in the opening round of the playoffs)," Swanson recalled. "All the clubhouse folks for the Knicks were giving me a hard time and saying that they were going to beat the Hawks and obviously that didn't even come close to happening."
This doesn't mean Swanson is yet ready to proclaim victory over the darned Dodgers, but it does mean he believes these Braves are perhaps more capable of finishing the deal than those three straight Atlanta playoff squads he's played on prior to this one.
"I feel like each year we've gotten better at learning that there's steps along the way that are to be celebrated and that you obviously want to earn, but that's not the ultimate goal, right?" Swanson explained.
He also believes the excellence it took down the stretch to win the East after being unable to climb above .500 for good until mid-August is now helping. Against a daunting September schedule the Braves won 12 of their last 15 games heading into the playoffs.
"In the past couple years I felt like the last week of the season we were kind of like, 'I'm not going to say it's over,' but we just kind of went in a different gear and I feel like that hurt us once we got to the postseason," Swanson explained.
"But this year we had to continue to fight all the way until the last week. So even when we clinched we were still in that mode of grinding and kind of in rhythm for what we wanted to do. I feel like that's kind of been a big difference for us this year."
Manager Brian Snitker also believes last season's NLCS collapse against the Dodgers may actually help this time around.
"I don't have to remind them of anything," he said Sunday in reference to 2020. "And I think everything that they experience every year going to the next year is huge. Just the experiences that these guys get and got last year in the NLCS, it's going to be good for them going forward."
Nothing is guaranteed, of course. The Dodgers are still the defending world champs. They still have the remarkable Walker Buehler going Tuesday against the salty, savvy Brave Charlie Morton. With the next three in Dodger Stadium, the Braves may still need to win two more this coming weekend back in the Big Peach to return to the World Series for the first time since 1999.
But something else Swanson said should make Braves Nation proud whatever this year's result. Discussing the Braves Way, a perceived nod to character over talent, Swanson said, "At the end of the day we have guys at every position that do things the right way. I feel like we as a team are, we treat each other well and I feel like that rubs off onto people. You can tell we genuinely care about each other and that we want each other to succeed, we want to hang out in the locker room as much as we can, we try and create an experience for one another that's very family-like. I think that that's just really something that's special about this team. And (the organization) has done a great job of consistently building that kind of atmosphere year in and year out."
Win or lose as this postseason continues, if that doesn't count for something, it should.
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com.