Let me put the L on the table before I say anything else, because that's the deal I make with you: I faded the A's streak Thursday night. I wrote it down, I told you I was betting the Angels — Soriano the ace over Springs the tomato can, take Los Angeles to cool off a team that had no business being a home favorite. The pick is a loss. Mark it.

Now let me tell you how it lost, because if you've read me for more than a week you already know my one recurring nightmare and this was it, in HD.

The Angels didn't just lose. They led. They led by seven. They put up eleven straight runs on the Athletics and at some point on Thursday night I was sitting there with the Angels comfortably ahead, doing the thing you should never do — counting it. And then the team I have spent two seasons calling a punchline, a logo with no city in front of it, a big-league club squatting in a Triple-A park in West Sacramento, did the only thing it apparently knows how to do anymore. It came back. From seven down. Jonah Heim, a pinch-hitter, with two outs in the ninth, tied it with a swing. Then they won it in the tenth. 12-11.

I have a number tattooed on my betting soul: fifty bucks turned into a live $213 three-leg parlay last year, and the Giants moneyline — the Giants, my own team — strangled it in the ninth. That's the feeling I reach for when I talk about owning a loss, the specific nausea of watching a lead you'd already spent get repossessed. Thursday was that, except this time I was rooting for the Halos to close it, which is its own kind of shameful, and they handed the ticket back like it was on fire.

Here's the part where I'm supposed to get mad at the Angels' bullpen, and sure, blowing eleven-to-four is a fireable offense in most professions. But I've been doing this long enough to know who the real culprit is, and it's not Soriano and it's not whichever middle reliever lit the fuse. It's me. This is the third time this week I leaned on the same crutch — the A's can't really be this good, fade the streak for plus money — and the streak keeps answering. Once it cashed (the Pirates coin flip). Then Kurtz and the lineup hung an eleven-spot on me. Now this. The market has been screaming something at me for ten days and I keep putting my fingers in my ears: this baseball team will not stop coming back.

So I'm not going to insult you by pulling a fresh line and telling you the next one is where it turns. Line not pulled — analysis only. The disciplined move after a week like this isn't a revenge bet, it's shutting up and admitting the read was wrong. Not the price, not the matchup — the thesis. I kept betting against a comeback machine because the roster looks like it shouldn't be one. The standings don't care what the roster looks like. Neither does Heim, coming off the bench with two outs and the season's narrative on the line.

There's a strange grief threaded through all of this that I can't quite shake. This is a team that got ripped out of Oakland, a fanbase scattered to the wind, a franchise playing in a minor-league yard while it waits on a desert that may or may not want it. By every reasonable measure they are the saddest story in the sport. And they are unkillable. They give up eleven in a row and win anyway. I bet against the ghost and the ghost dunked on me.

Record's 8-4 now, still up on the year, and I'd rather show you the four than hide them. But this one stings in a particular spot, because it wasn't a bad beat — bad beats are when the math was right and the dice were wrong. This was the math being wrong. I had ten days of evidence and I bet the past instead of the present.

The A's are coming back. They're always coming back. I'm done standing in front of it.