It's no doubt true of passionate supporters of all teams in all sports, but I speak for Giants fans when I say that doomsday never seems more than a calendar page away. We love our team when they're winning, but at the smallest sign of a snag in the fabric, we are ready to write our heroes off and slink away. And then they do something wonderful, and we love them again, but the sense of dread is never far away.

We can be comically entertaining about our paranoia, but it doesn't do much good for our state of mind. I had to get off Twitter for a while this evening after the Giants fell behind the Astros (usually known as the "lowly Astros") early in the game. Tweeters on my timeline wanted to release players who had been heroes yesterday. They were ready to concede any chance that the Giants would even get into the postseason, much less survive to do what they did in 2010.

They won the World Series that year, in case I haven't reminded you today. And it was totally unexpected and against all odds. They didn't even get into the playoffs until they won on the last day of the season, but once they did their superior pitching and some timely hitting and not just a little bit of luck carried them through. They were the only team in all of the major leagues to win a game in November that year.

In tonight's game, the Giants were down 4-0, after having beaten the Astros in the first two games of the series. It isn't easy to sweep a series, even against a lowly team that has already been relegated.

That's a soccer-related joke, because the Astros are more or less voluntarily being relocated into the American League next year, for reasons that have more to do with mathematics and dollar signs than anything baseball fans actually care about. If anything, it's a promotion, not a relegation, but a promotion of the worst team in one league to a stronger league where they will struggle not to be even worse.

The owners of the Astros will get richer, because they were paid handsomely for the change of venue. Astros fans will be the ones who suffer most from this, but I'm not an Astros fan and can't really speak for them. I can only guess that they will feel slightly less connected to the team when it moves to its new league. But they get to see their team beaten up by a whole new set of teams next season, so I guess that's something to look forward to.

The American League isn't actually superior to the National League. It has better players, but the baseball isn't as good. In my opinion, which in this forum is all that counts.

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Back to tonight's game. The Giants fell behind early, and you'd have thought the sun had flamed out and the world was ending. Twitter blew up with doomsday scenarios, and the entire season was written off. Just as a reminder: The Giants came into this game in first place, and they would remain in first place whether they won or lost. And there is more than a month left in the season, a month when many more things can go wrong (or, possibly, right).

By the end, sanity had been restored to the asylum. The Giants came back to win, 8-4, and as they were scoring runs in inning after inning, the fans and tweeters came to their senses. And then they went a little too far the other way, as we fans are wont to do. We're on fire, they said. We can't be stopped, they cried. We're going all the way.

Well, maybe we are.