There is a city in Wisconsin that has been waiting forty-four years for a baseball game, and on Friday, October 23, the game is finally coming, and the city has behaved, the entire time, like a person who knows the game is coming.

That is the part I want to talk about. Not the baseball. The waiting.

The Milwaukee Brewers have been to one World Series, in 1982, and lost it, and have not been back since — the first time in 44 years, a span that includes three presidents named Reagan-era things, the entire existence of the internet, and approximately nine hundred and forty thousand opinions about the designated hitter. And Milwaukee did not do what the rest of us do when we want something.

The rest of us post about it. We post about it daily. We post about it at 2 a.m. We create accounts specifically for the posting. We announce, to strangers, that we are “manifesting” the thing, as if the thing is a parking space.

Milwaukee bought a ticket window. The team sold World Series tickets before it had won the series that the tickets are for — a financial instrument that exists in no market on Earth, a futures contract on joy. The city went 4-0 at home in the postseason, which is the statistical way of saying the city did not leave.

I have lived in cities that lose things and then complain about losing them. Milwaukee lost things and then built a park where the losing happened, and kept the lights on.

The lesson is not about baseball. The lesson is that patience, in America, has been rebranded as a failure to act, and the whole country has accepted the rebrand. We treat waiting like a defect. We treat the long game like a euphemism for not having a game. And then we are surprised, every October, when the city that kept its seats empty for four decades is the one that fills them first.

The Brewers host Game 1 on Friday at 7 p.m. The time is the same for every game, home and away, 7 p.m., a schedule the team set with the confidence of people who have waited this long and can handle a small inconvenience.

Somebody in Milwaukee is raking the field right now. They have been raking the field for a while. They will rake it Friday, and the stands will be full, and nobody in those stands will be manifesting anything.

They will just be there. That’s the whole trick. That’s the whole trick of every city that ever got the thing: it stayed.