Calling all around the world: Declare yourself a Pittsburgh Pirates fan right here and watch your life get better

I'd lost my passion for baseball several years ago.  Maybe it was one too many pickoff throws to first base that never came close to picking off the runner. Maybe it was too many half-innings with three pitching-changes. Maybe it was the millionth foul ball I witnessed. Maybe it was remembering all those moon-shot home runs of years past that were steroid-injected. The game lost me. It was time to move on.

But this year, the fire is back. Because my recently adopted team, the Pittsburgh Pirates, will make this the greatest season ever. I sense it with every fiber of my existence, and I'm the same person who said Muharak would fall and Bieber would rise before either happened.

My Buccos will not only going to end their streak of 18 straight losing seasons (and six straight years of at least 95 losses). We're going to win the NL Central, win the NLDS and NLDS, and take out some bunch of overpaid American League punks in the World Series.

Sure, we went 57-105 last year. Sure, we lost a game to Milwaukee by the score of 20-0. Sure, we've got a roster-full of players who couldn't make it on Fox News, MSNBC or TMZ.com if they were actual Somali pirates hijacking boats on the Allegheny, Ohio and Monongahela rivers. (Looking at the roster today, I only saw one name I recognized, and that was someone I'd mistaken for someone else. (And I'd have to Google my way to learning the name of the Pirates' manager.)

But it all feels so right this year. Small-market Green Bay won the Super Bowl. Small-market San Antonio has the best record in the NBA. Small-market Cedar Rapids had a movie named for it. Why not small-market Pittsburgh? Why not now, other than a severe lack of talented players?

Please, put aside your allegiances to other teams for a year. Join the Greatest Sports Story Ever, the rags-to-riches 2011 championship season of the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Hlog's Team. Sign up in the comments section and declare yourself a Pirates fan like me.

You'll be scorned at first. Your sanity will be questioned. But oh, how much fun it will be as the Bucs get off to a surprising start, build some confidence, hang in there through the dog days of summer, and turn on the jets in September. We Pirates fans will party while all other fans envy us. We'll have a lot of bandwagon-jumpers to deal with, but that's OK. There will be room for everyone!

But don't wait. April is fast approaching, and it will soon be time to see budding superstars like Garrett Jones, Neil Walker and Evan Meek help rack up the wins. You just know pitchers Charlie Morton, Ross Ohlendorf and Jeff Karstens will do better than their combined 6-33 record of last year. You just know the Pirates will improve on their league-worst team batting average of .242 and league-worst ERA of 5.00.

We had the second-best fielding in the majors last year. The pitching and hitting will catch up, and then it's all confetti and balloons in October.

Oh, how I pity all the other teams' fans.

Anyway, sign on here. You want to be a Pirates fan. You need to be a Pirates fan. It will be a life-changing year for you if you do. The good kind, not that "My life turned into a country music song" kind.