In 1908, the Chicago Cubs of Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance and Three-Finger Brown won the World Series; they were, of course, the last Cubs team to do so. It’s worth taking a second to think about how long ago this really was to gain some measure of appreciation for the scale of the Cubs’ long history of failure.

When the Cubs won their last World Series, each player earned a winner’s share of $1,318. The Burnham Plan, which envisioned Chicago as an integrated system of parks and boulevards and in its essentials constrains city planners to this day, would not be published for another year. The first of the famous bascule bridges that cross the Chicago River in the Loop would not be built for another five years; the river itself would not be straightened for another 22 years. Eight years would pass before the Cubs moved into Wrigley Field.

Forty-five years would pass from the time they won their last championship before the Cubs fielded their first black player, Ernie Banks. A week from today, on Opening Day, the Cubs will unveil a statue commemorating his marvelous career, right at the corner of Clark and Addison, before their game against the Milwaukee Brewers. Banks never played in a World Series game, and before he turned 71, the Cubs had never won a postseason series of any kind in his lifetime.

That this hasn’t scuppered Banks’s legendary disposition — to maintain a sour mood through a chance encounter with the great man at the ballpark, you’d have to be the sort of person who kicks dogs — is all the more reason to rue it, and wish that the Cubs could actually manage to rise above themselves for once. If only for the joy it would bring Banks and millions like him, who have suffered through black cats walking on the field; gormless fans snatching fly balls from the air during playoff games; the invasion of their ballpark, the most perfect city block in America, by endless waves of drunken, hooting maniacs, and other indignities, the Cubs really ought to win. The curses of the Bambino and the Black Sox have come and gone, the Florida Marlins have won two championships, and the North Side has had nothing at all. It’s time for this to end. There are very old people who have lived long, happy lives and are waiting for the Cubs to win so that they can die in peace.

It’s with dread, then, that one notes that the Cubs have a plausible claim to being the best team in the National League. Their best players don’t match up to the Mets’ best, because Flushing boasts Johan Santana, the best pitcher in the league, and David Wright, perhaps the best position player, as well as Carlos Beltran and Jose Reyes. But the Cubs are very, very good; the frantic efforts made and hundreds of millions of dollars spent over the last two years in an effort to avoid the clock rolling over on a full hundred years of losing have paid off.

The Cubs have speed, power, and patience. Left fielder Alfonso Soriano and infielders Derrek Lee and Aramis Ramirez form a solid wall of right-handed sock in the middle of the lineup, and veteran Japanese right fielder Kosuke Fukudome, a patient linedrive hitter in the line of Fred Lynn and J.D. Drew, adds the left-handed complement they’ve lacked. Twenty-five-year-old catcher Geovany Soto, who hit .389 BA/.433 OBA/.667 SLG during the Cubs’ playoff drive last September, and 23-year-old center fielder Felix Pie, who’s ready to crush the ball in Chicago after having crushed it in Iowa for two years, fill the holes the team couldn’t fill last year. Toss in middle infielders Ryan Theriot and Mark DeRosa, who play with the abandon of old-timers in grainy newsreels, and the team has as well-rounded a lineup as they’ve had in my lifetime. It’s even young — Soriano and Lee are the old men at 32, and both are fine athletes who play as if they were younger than they are.

On the mound, ferocious, bull-like ace Carlos Zambrano lives up to the Cubs’ fine recent tradition, noted by Bill James in his most recent book, of relentless, Nolan Ryan-style power pitching. You may strike out, and you may well draw a walk, but you likely aren’t getting a hit, and if you do, Zambrano is liable to stalk toward the baseline hollering at you. He’s backed by Ted Lilly and Rich Hill, two lefties with deceptively hard fastballs and, in Hill’s case, a cartoon hook, and a whole bullpen stocked with vicious strikeout artists. The kings are Carlos Marmol, whose 96 strikeouts in 69.1 innings last year just hint at the sheer violence of his stuff, and Kerry Wood, another throwback whose story, involving a will far stronger than his arm, makes him one of those heartbreaking characters that define Chicago baseball. He deserves a ring as much as anyone in the sport, as does manager Lou Piniella, who’s been cuffed in this space but proved last year that given a club with a real chance to win he’s still every bit the motivator, tactician, and blusterer he was 20 years ago.

This team could win, which will make it all the worse for their loyalists when they don’t. One hundred years on, they have a fully admirable team and as good a chance as they’ve had in anyone’s memory, and one can be almost certain they’ll find some novel and truly unreal way of letting the prize slip from their grasp. Some day, perhaps when Chicago has floated off into the center of Lake Michigan or been launched into space on spindizzies, they’ll manage the big win. Whoever is alive to see it will love baseball in a way they never have before.

tmarchman@nysun.com