LAST NIGHT, the Tampa Bay Rays denied the Boston Red Sox a third World Series in five years with a historic win of their own: the Rays concluded their tenth season with the best record in the American League, becoming the second 1998 expansion team to make the World Series in just a decade. That might be the blink of an eye for the MLB, but, to some of us, it’s been a long, lonely fight.

I was 12 years old, glued tight to a green plastic chair at The Ballpark in Arlington (the since twice renamed home of the Texas Rangers), when I saw it for first time: an elegant, forbidding sea creature swooshing across a glossy palette of every color in the spectrum. The dazzling debut logo of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays (right). Gawking at the American League directory in the Rangers vs. Athletics game program, Tampa Bay became my favorite baseball team—before they had a roster or had ever played a game.

That same year, I registered my first “free homepage” on GeoCities, before Yahoo and when its pages were divided into little colonies called things like “Madison Avenue” and “Coliseum.” Back in the age of “homesteaders,” and the infamous floating watermark. The age of the browser status bar crawl and dreadful, ubiquitous HTML elements like <BLINK> and <MARQUEE>. The age of “sign my guestbook!” The personal website craze hit, and, like Facebook and MySpace, pretty much everyone on the planet with an internet connection had one. Okay, not quite like Facebook.

The roster page consisted of lime-green text on a black background, with a garish multicolored bar stretching across the screen. Quinton McCracken, the Devil Rays’ first center fielder, was the first hallowed name. He and the rest of the hapless 1998 team would temporarily become my baseball heroes: Fred McGriff, Miguel Cairo, Kevin Stocker. I was fascinated by the terrifying, sidearm-throwing Rolando Arrojo, and cringed every night the struggling Tony Saunders took the mound. I woke up at 5:00 a.m. each morning to update the box scores on before school. (“Our” audience of two could not be let down.) As Matt Drudge says, a website is a broadcast; if it stops, it dies.

I learned about the concept of load time when I built an obligatory Tropicana Field page. DevilRaysFan.com was so fanatically loyal to that old stadium—catwalks, glowing orange dome, faux-dirt warning track and all—that it took 15 high-resolution panoramic views and seating charts to express the full measure its architectural enthusiasm. (I never said it was a viewable page.) It pained me when sportscasters made fun of Tropicana’s ground rules. Come on, where else can you hit a home run without getting the ball over the fence? But no one ever listens to me, anyway.

1998 was a tough year for expansion-team fans. The Devil Rays finished the season with the worst record in the American League, 63-99, and the Arizona Diamondbacks were just two games better. (One small silver lining: Tampa Bay outperformed their in-state rivals, the worst-in-the-majors Florida Marlins.) The hated Yankees not only won the Devil Rays’ division but also the World Series, after stepping all over my hometown Texas Rangers in the playoffs. I couldn’t have imagined a worse conclusion to the 1998 season if I had tried. Disillusionment with baseball, as well as a soon-to-be-consuming interest in music, signaled the end of DevilRaysFan.com.

The Tampa Bay Rays (ugh—it kills me, too), meanwhile, not only continued to play horribly, but also did unforgivable violence to the only things that made them cool. Last year, they dropped “devil” from their name, replacing its previous symmetrical cadence with a cartoonish-sounding rhyme. Worse, they ambiguized the meaning of “ray” to imply an obligatory lame-state-motto mascot, rather than the always preferable dangerous-state-animal mascot. And worst of all, they abandoned their unique colors for clichéd Navy blue; their custom font for what’s essentially Garamond Bold; and their progressive logo for a stale, text-heavy baseball diamond (left). The moment I belatedly discovered these travesties, I wished I still had a fan site on which to rant. (Only Stephen Colbert, and not the Rays’ upcoming World Series appearance, could heal this hurt. His rhetorical salve begins at 2:50 in this clip.)

It’s a little bit of a shame that DevilRaysFan.com didn’t live to see the heroes it championed win their first A.L.C.S. On its closing day, my unread little website was a triumph of absurd motivation and a testament to self-made Web 1.0 artistic (if not commercial) success. It sported a clean interface, custom graphics, a pull-down navigation menu, and even some basic JavaScript. A sad, hilarious experience it would be to peruse its pages now. But it’s pretty amazing what one can do with endless free time and irrational belief in a dreadful, garishly outfitted baseball team. It’s nice to see them on top.