Any minute now, Gaslamp Ball will welcome its one millionth visit. At the time of this writing, we're a little over 500 visits away. Officially, if you count the stuff from PFS76, we hit a million a week or two ago, but we like celebrating random milestones.

I imagine the person making the one millionth visit will probably not realize that anything special is happening, and indeed maybe it's not that special. It's just a number.

Maybe this person will be a regular reader and is just checking to see if there's anything new to be seen. Maybe the person will be brand new. What if the person's a Dodgers fan? Ugh. Maybe the person will be somebody who's just discovering the site via Yahoo. Welcome, to all you Yahoo visitors, btw. Thanks for stopping by.

Or maybe, we'll get to 999,999 visits or something really close and then people will all stop coming at once. Like Greg Maddux's 350th win or Sam Rice finishing just shy of 3,000 hits.

In any case, it feels like a big number for a blog written by and for, so called, "fairweather" fans. If we're so fairweather, then what are we still doing here and how did so many people decide to show up over the course of four years of blogging?

The answer is simple: We kinda didn't realize what we were doing and it just happened. 

Kinda like college or when you suddenly take a look around and wonder, "How did I end up driving this Miata? What brought me to this point? I wasn't trying to end up in a Miata and yet here I am."

Maybe the Padres will pull something similar off for the 2009 season. Maybe if we don't think about it too hard and just leave glimmers of hope, the Padres will prove all the doubters wrong and hit some milestone and we'll all kinda wonder how they managed to do it.

Probably not, but... you know... worth hoping.

In any case, here's to our one millionth visitor, whoever you may be and here's to hoping the next million visitors are as good times as the first million were.