For a moment Monday, the Cincinnati Reds were living down to expectations. Elly De La Cruz, the most popular player in baseball right now, stepped to the plate to open the game against Milwaukee, lofted a ball to the deepest part of American Family Field … and center fielder Joey Wiemer leaped up and snared it for the first out of the game. A couple of innings later, Milwaukee’s scoreboard noted that de la Cruz “Almost hit a home run in the first inning … but didn’t.”

Nice player you got there, Cincinnati. Shame he didn’t come through. Same old Cincy story.

Only this time, the story changed. Two innings later, De La Cruz hit a ball so far that Wiemer would've needed to take an Uber to catch it:

The homer marked the latest in a series of did-you-see-that moments in one of the most remarkable career debuts in decades, from cannon-armed throws to cinematic home runs to sheer gleeful joy at playing baseball.

In itself, that would be reason to hope in the Queen City. But a few hundred yards down the Ohio riverfront, Joe Burrow is bringing both attitude and victory — the “both” is the key here — to the Cincinnati Bengals franchise. The cigar-smoking, Heisman-winning national champion from LSU took the Bengals all the way to the Super Bowl in his first full season and has established Cincinnati as one of the best bets to win it all this season.

To top it all off, University of Cincinnati football — a surprise College Football Playoff team just a year ago — is making the leap to the Big 12, and FC Cincinnati is the best team in MLS. In short, it’s a fine time to be a Cincinnati sports fan.

“This is the craziest era I’ve ever seen, and I’m 55 years old,” says Jim Moehring, owner of the Holy Grail Tavern & Grille, a sports bar located about 100 yards from Great American Ball Park’s home plate. “The energy these teams are bringing right now is unmatched.”

Suddenly, “Wincinnati” isn’t just a desperate marketing slogan; it’s an accurate description. A city whose national reputation rests, in part, on chili that looks like an industrial accident, a city that shares its “Queen City” nickname with Charlotte — somehow, Cincinnati, of all places, has swagger.

What the heck happened? How has this town turned things around? Could titles be headed Cincinnati’s way again, at long last? Or will this all end, as some Cincinnati fans fear, in the most spectacular heartbreak yet?

“With all three major sports teams either good or cool or having a legitimate chance to win a title, folks are enjoying it,” says Mo Egger, a longtime Cincinnati sports talk radio host. “I don’t hear quite the fatalistic tones we usually do.”

Moehring notes that he has had to hire dozens more employees to staff the crush of Reds fans visiting the Grail for both home and away games. “Weekend games are selling out, and we’ll still have 400 people inside the Grail watching every pitch, groaning and cheering,” he says. “There will be 3,000 people watching the Jumbotron outside the stadium. It feels like Bengals playoff games.”

'Always expect the worst'

There was a time when Cincinnati was synonymous with baseball dominance. The Big Red Machine — still one of the great team nicknames in sports history — carved a path of destruction through baseball in the 1970s. All-Star-level quality stacked every position: Joe Morgan, Tom Seaver, Johnny Bench, Pete Rose, Ken Griffey Sr., Tony Perez, George Foster and more. No team this side of the ‘85 Chicago Bears casts as long a shadow or has as strong a hold on its fan base.

And then … nothing. Well, almost nothing; the Reds won again in 1990, an out-of-nowhere, back-to-nowhere title that even longtime Cincinnati fans can overlook.

“In those days,” Moehring says, “we were assuming that every 10 years or so, the Reds would be in the World Series, and every 10 years, the Bengals would be in the Super Bowl.”

“When the Reds were constantly bad, people would wax poetic about the past,” Egger says. “It’s a source of frustration for me. I can hold those teams in the ‘70s in reverence, but I wish the modern club would give us a reason to talk about something other than beating the Red Sox in seven games in 1975.”

The Bengals, meanwhile, reached two Super Bowls in the ‘80s but lost to Joe Montana and the 49ers in both, including an instant-classic comeback victory with 34 seconds remaining in Super Bowl XXXIII. “Pessimism” doesn’t begin to describe the mindset of Cincinnati fans.

“Always expect the worst,” Egger says. “Most fan bases love to romanticize how failure is always around the corner, things never go their way. But look at our track record.”

Since 1990, the Reds have reached the postseason only five times and won a total of one series — the 1995 Division Series. In three of those playoff appearances, the Reds didn’t win a single game; in 1995, the Braves swept them out of the NLCS. The only time in the past 32 years that the Reds even put up a fight in October came in 2012, when the team fell 3-2 to the Giants.

How bad has it gotten for Reds fans? This bad: One of the team’s few 21st-century highlights came when the Reds’ Todd Frazier won the Home Run Derby — yes, a meaningless, exhibition batting practice event — when the 2015 All-Star Game was held in Cincinnati. That’s pretty much it.

Joe Burrow to the rescue

The Bengals have offered more of both hope and heartbreak. Prior to Burrow’s arrival, the team hadn’t won a playoff game since 1990. The Bengals reached the postseason seven times during that span but could not even get out of the wild-card round. At one point, the Bengals exited the first round five years in a row — and yes, there’s a healthy dose of what-could-have-been there, too.

In their most recent pre-Burrow playoff appearance, for instance, Cincinnati held both the ball and a one-point lead over the Steelers with 1:45 left. But one fumble, two ugly penalties and a field goal later, the stunned and broken Bengals left the postseason empty-handed yet again.

“That was the first time folks started to articulate that we’re never going to win,” Egger says. “Some people call it the curse of Bo Jackson. The last year the Bengals won a playoff game [pre-Burrow] was the game where Bo Jackson broke his hip.”

Egger can trot out the greatest misses with ease: the University of Cincinnati’s longtime NCAA tournament futility, including blowing a 22-point lead to Nevada as a No. 2 seed in 2018; No. 1 overall pick Carson Palmer blowing out his knee in a 2006 playoff game that snuffed out any hope of victory; hometown hero Ken Griffey Jr. never rallying the Reds to a title; disgraced owner Marge Schott and disgraced star Pete Rose serving as avatars for the entire city in the minds of America.

“It’s just been a nonstop barrage,” Egger says, “of heartbreak and failure.”

Burrow began changing the dynamic before he even arrived in Cincinnati. He was the consensus No. 1 pick in the lockdown 2020 draft when the Bengals held that No. 1 pick, and the national media — homebound with little else to do but critique draftees’ living rooms and sling hot takes — wondered whether Burrow ought to pull an Eli Manning/John Elway and refuse to play for Cincinnati.

“People here got really defensive over that,” Egger recalls. “There were a lot of critiques lobbed at the franchise, some valid, some ridiculous. But that offseason, people started to rally around a Bengals team that they had for years been criticizing.”

In his first game, Burrow engineered what appeared to be a game-winning drive against the Chargers … only to see it negated by an offensive pass interference penalty. Ten weeks later, with the Bengals slogging through a miserable 2-9-1 season, Burrow’s knee was shredded, ACL and MCL torn and PCL damaged. He was out for the season, and the woes of same old Bengals resonated across the tri-state area.

But Burrow returned in 2021 and, miracle of miracles, led the team to an AFC North title and the team’s first postseason berth since 2015. The Bengals drew the Raiders for their wild-card matchup, and after a 26-19 victory, the city erupted in a way Egger hadn’t imagined was possible.

“The apprehension that hovered over that first playoff game — it was, ‘How are they going to blow it, how are they going to screw us this time?’” he recalls. “When we won, you would have thought we won a title. I’m not sure winning a championship would be a greater public release of euphoria than finally winning a playoff game.”

The Bengals went on to knock off No. 1 seed Tennessee and then outlast the mighty Kansas City Chiefs in overtime before pushing the Rams all the way to the brink in Super Bowl LVI. Cincinnati held the lead late in the game before surrendering the Rams’ winning touchdown with two minutes remaining, but that loss didn’t bring on another wave of despondency. After that first playoff win, everything that season was chocolate-and-chili-tinged gravy.

Cincinnati followed the Super Bowl season with the kind of year that suggests this team could be a force for some time to come. The Bengals captured their second straight division title in 2022, got past both the Ravens and Bills in the playoffs, then fell in an AFC championship rematch to the eventual Super Bowl champion Chiefs. They enter this season at +900 odds to win the Super Bowl, trailing only the Chiefs, Eagles and Bills.

They’re even feeling good enough to take shots at the king. Receiver Ja’Marr Chase, when told that Burrow believes Patrick Mahomes is the best quarterback in the league, replied, “Pat who?” That kind of trash talk would've been laughable in years past, but given that the teams are 1-1 against each other in the past two conference title games … well, it’s still laughable, but at least the Bengals are also in the title conversation.

Big Red Machine 2.0

The Reds, meanwhile, are a couple of years behind on the victory trend line, but they’ve fired up all of baseball in a similar fashion, thanks to the astounding emergence of De La Cruz. Built more like an NBA swingman than a baseball player, De La Cruz has thrown a jolt into an entire sport. Consider the highlights he has created in less than two months:

• Hitting for the cycle, the youngest player to do so in half a century

• Setting a record for the fastest throw from third to first

• Stealing second, third and home, back-to-back-to-back

• Proclaiming himself “the fastest man in the world,” then proceeding to beat out an infield grounder

• Blasting the kind of mammoth home runs those in attendance will tell their grandchildren about

One player can’t turn around the fortunes of an entire baseball team — Shohei Ohtani has proven that — but one player can definitely make a day at the ballpark or a game on TV that much more entertaining. The Reds are very much in the playoff hunt, and the emergence of young stars such as De La Cruz — and the revitalizing effect they’ve had on old-school legends such as Joey Votto — is exactly why.

“Cincinnati is a conservative town,” Egger says. “The Reds famously for years had a no-facial-hair, black-shoes policy. So to watch players flipping bats, showing personality — yes, older fans want them to act like they've been there before, but I think it’s cool and interesting to watch.”

The secret, Egger believes, is the way the 2023 Reds play ball. Look beyond the theatrics, and you’ll see a team that resembles the Big Red Machine in more ways than the name on the uniform. Aggressive play at the plate and in the field, push-the-envelope base-stealing, prizing speed over the homer-or-strikeout ethos of analytically driven teams … this is the style of baseball that brings back old-school fans. So what if players don the occasional viking helmet after a home run?

“This year has been like 1990,” longtime Reds fan Hank Schmidt says. “It’s unexpected [winning games], but as soon as it happens, it’s like flipping a switch. We’re ready to go. Now, no matter where you go, people are talking about the Reds.”

To longtime Cincinnati fans, the fact that the Bengals and Reds are winning on and off the field at the same time is a minor miracle. For years, the knock was that the Reds built a good brand but a terrible team, while the Bengals had a decent team but an awful brand.

“Trust was not a given here between Bengals ownership and Reds ownership [and the fans],” Moehring says. Tone-deaf comments such as Reds president Phil Castellini’s offhanded “Where are you going to go?” response to critical fans last year haven’t helped.

But the Bengals have modernized their approach, stepping up their social media game and honoring the past with a Ring of Honor. And the Reds now have a team that generates the kind of joyful headlines and delirious talk-radio segments that the Big Red Machine once did.

“The Bengals have solidified in a lot of people’s minds that they’re committed to winning,” Moehring says. “People are finally trusting the Reds’ ownership group, too.”

There’s definitely work to do for both teams to close the championship deal. That game in which De La Cruz had his revenge against Wiemer and the Milwaukee scoreboard operator? Yeah, the Reds lost that one on a walk-off and are going back and forth with Milwaukee in a battle for NL Central supremacy. To reach the World Series, they’ll need to get past some combination of the fearsome Braves, Dodgers and Diamondbacks.

The Bengals, meanwhile, play in one of the most stacked conferences in memory, with Mahomes’ Chiefs, Josh Allen’s Bills, Aaron Rodgers’ Jets and many more teams in their path. They’ve done it before, yes, but as Mahomes reminded the Bengals after Chase’s jab, he has two rings, while Cincinnati still has exactly zero.

Still, there’s legitimate hope in Cincinnati these days, and not the kind of fleeting, false “maybe we’ll win the lottery one day!” hope. The hometown teams are winning games, and everybody’s enjoying the ride. Either one of those makes for a memorable era. Both of them together? Not to jinx anything, but Cincinnati might be on the verge of something very special.

“The future is so damn bright,” Moehring says. “People are starting to really have some fun with this. It’s stupid fantastic.”