In hindsight, you could see trouble brewing. The moment the Giants’ final game in New York ended, the players bolted for the clubhouse and a mob descended onto the field. A teenager ran straight for second base, tearing it from its moorings. The crowd kept cops away from the fans prying home plate loose. The bullpen roof splintered beneath scores of battering hands. A small group pried off the bronze plaque honoring Eddie Grant, the most prominent Major Leaguer to die in World War I. The next day, September 30, 1957, a Daily News full-spread headline proclaimed, “The N.Y. Giants Is Dead.” Funny to most of the world—but not to these fans. Their team was moving to San Francisco.

Out west, buoyant city officials had already placed Polo Grounds sod under glass in city hall. But the rioting fans in New York, at once despondent and angry, couldn’t have cared less about the team’s new life on the ascendant West Coast. They tore the Polo Grounds to pieces, yanking out chunks of turf as if they could replant them the following spring and see their beloved team grow tall again.

Out of this agony, the San Francisco Giants were born. This year’s home opener, on April 7, will mark the team’s 50th anniversary. While we’ll celebrate its great stars, from Willie Mays and Willie McCovey to Barry Bonds, and the 32 winning seasons (compared with only 18 losers), there remains a subject so inherently miserable, it rarely bears thought or mention: The most heartbroken team in baseball is now ours, the boys in black and orange, from San Francisco.

We don’t think of ourselves as long-suffering. After all, in their half century in San Francisco, the Giants have won 4,117 games and lost 3,826, an overall winning percentage of .518. They’ve made eight trips to postseason and three to the World Series. Time and again, the Giants have held greatness in their grasp, and greatness is what we see.

But in reality, we have not been great. We have been tragic. Even Willie McCovey, who came up as a San Francisco Giant in 1959 and experienced almost the entire 50 years as a star player, adviser, and employee, seems a bit hazy about the situation. “Until I read about it recently,” he told me, “I didn’t realize the Giants had gone that long.” It has been a long time—in fact, forever.

The nature of our heartbreak is very different from that felt in the original baseball cities of Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and Cleveland. Baseball’s hot stove warms the dreary winters, and the game carries the weight of dreams that pass through generations. Here, it is one more diversion in a lifestyle loaded with them, and a relatively recent one at that. As worried as we are about politics, wars, the environment, and our spiritual condition, we tend to be blasé about the fate of the Giants, reveling absentmindedly in the team’s glories, not dwelling on when they disappoint. After all, most of us who go to Giants games are essentially optimists and polymaths, transplants from elsewhere who have so many other activities to pursue that we stop to brood on sporting failures only when there’s a rare lull in the action.

But our passive contentment doesn’t change this fact: San Francisco has gone longer without winning its first World Series than any other city in Major League Baseball.

Yes, sports fans, San Francisco and its Giants are now the undisputed champs of unconsummated baseball. The Philadelphia Phillies played for 77 years before winning their first World Series; yet throughout that impressive futile streak, fans could watch the other team in town, the storied Philadelphia Athletics, win titles regularly. Brooklyn’s team went 52 years before its first World Series title; but during that stretch, the other New York teams won world titles galore—and by 2010, San Francisco looks likely to pass Brooklyn’s milestone, anyway. With two championships in the past four years, the 86-years-without-a-title Boston Red Sox have shattered their catastrophic cachet. Even the two teams that still tout longer modern-day strings of disaster than the Giants, the Chicago Cubs and the Cleveland Indians (who will mark the 100th and 60th anniversaries, respectively, of their last World Series titles this fall), have real glory to fall back on. The Cubs won the Series in fifth and sixth years after the series was established, while the Indians brought Cleveland titles in 1920 and again in 1948.

Our Giants, meanwhile, have arguably boasted more truly great teams, with more Hall of Famers, than any other team in baseball in the last 50 years. Yet still no titles.

If we’d been alert to trends, we might have predicted as much; the New York Giants’ history, as seemingly glorious as it was, was steeped in disappointment. The Giants had endured Merkle’s Boner, the infamous 1908 pennant-race debacle in which Fred Merkle, on first base, watched the winning run score and then left the field without touching second, throwing a crucial game into a tie and ultimately handing the Cubs the pennant. They’d lost more World Series than anyone but the Dodgers—those bums. By 1958, replaying his years as a New York Giants fan, the dean of baseball writers, Roger Angell, warned the “poor innocents” of San Francisco “that their Giants also hold the undisputed championship for hard luck—for losing ball games and pennants and championships in bitter, hair-tearing, unimaginable misadventures.”

Or we might have foreseen it in how slow we were to embrace Willie Mays, New York’s hero prior to switching coasts. “This is the damnedest town,” wrote Frank Conniff, covering a visit to San Francisco by Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. “They cheer Khrushchev and boo Willie Mays.” You could see ominous clouds—or was it freezing fog?—when Candlestick Park was built. History tells of Richard Nixon throwing out the first ball, Giants pitcher Stu Miller getting blown off the mound in an All-Star game, and fans wrapped in blankets, teeth chattering, suffering through another late-season Giants breakdown.

For those with long memories, the disappointments are still etched there, stinging like an ancient punch in the gut. Cut to a low-light reel, its contents plucked almost randomly from among many more like it: Giant Juan Marichal cold-cocking Dodger John Roseboro with his bat and getting suspended for eight crucial games, enabling the Dodgers to beat the Giants by two games in 1965—the first of five painful second-place finishes in a row. The team finally making it back to the playoffs after 16 years in 1987 and leading the Cardinals three games to two—and never scoring another run. Jose Cruz dropping an easy fly ball against the 2003 Marlins, and, in that same playoff series, the final out: lead-footed J.T. Snow lumbering home, valiantly colliding with catcher Ivan Rodriguez, but failing to jar the ball loose. Even scenes away from the diamond spin a sad story: Barry Bonds, possibly the greatest hitter ever to swing a bat, wending his way in and out of courtrooms, where he now faces criminal charges in a federal steroids case. History also tells of an earthquake—a capricious natural force that could strike at any time, but which happened to rumble in 1989, just as the Giants were about to play their first home World Series game in 27 years.

Earthquakes—what better metaphor for our relationship with the Giants? Earthquakes helped form our crumpled velvet hills, stunning vistas, and beautiful bays, yet we manage to forget how they also lurk beneath us, coiled like snakes, ready to upend our daily lives. In the same way, we take pleasure from our Giants, strolling the walkway above right field, beers in our hands, cheering another win while forgetting the inevitable disaster to come. We recall the fantastic home runs, but choose to ignore the unpleasant realities: for example, that Joe Morgan’s famous Dodgers-beating home run in 1982 came only after the Dodgers eliminated the Giants; or that J.T. Snow’s clutch blast to tie the Mets in 2000 came in a game (and playoff series) that the Giants still managed to lose.

To be fair, the Giants have often merited high hopes. During the team’s first 15 years here, fans got to see lineups built around Mays, probably the greatest all-around ballplayer who ever lived. For the last 15 years, we’ve had teams built around his godson, Barry Bonds. Many of their teams were really good. What’s more, many of us who fill the stands at AT&T Park, having moved here from somewhere else, aren’t inclined to focus on how the Giants always ultimately disappoint. Of course, the mostly blue-collar die-hards that used to go to Candlestick Park—denigrated by sports–talk show host Jim Rome as “battery chuckers”—remember it all. But now they’re outnumbered by highbrows who work at startups around South Park, see the signs of pennant champs up above O’Doul Gate, nod to the statues of Mays and Marichal, and are simply happy to go to the ballpark, grab some garlic fries and a Gordon Biersch, soak in views of the bay, and, oh yes, cheer on the Giants. Baseball, the late commissioner Bart Giamatti once wrote, “is designed to break your heart…. As soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.” Nice poetry­—and appropriate, given that he was writing about his Red Sox’s Homeric tragedies. But today’s Giants fans just don’t suffer the same old hang-ups.

Giants broadcaster Mike Krukow both promotes and mirrors this glass-half-full DNA. He’s a native Californian, smart and voluble, with many interests beyond baseball; and a former 20-game winner for the Giants who once played for the Cubs. Around Wrigley Field, he says, the attitude is often “How will the Cubs blow it this year?” (His Cubs manager once said during spring training that the team was lousy, and the squad proved him right.) But when Krukow discusses the Giants, he always favors hope over hopelessness. This year’s team, for example, is coming off a last-place finish, but he wants to talk about pitchers Matt Cain and Tim Lincecum. “Once the young arms figure this stuff out,” he predicts, “the team’s going to get well in a hurry.”

How many more titleless years will it take for bitterness to seep into Kruk’s soul? For how long will San Francisco find our players’ ring-free hands tolerable, almost sweet? What if another 50 years go by? Will we finally turn deeply inward, take on the Giants as a life-or-death matter, and seriously mull the existence of curses? Or will we continue to simply enjoy watching them, even as they break our hearts again and again?

The answer has to be yes. God—or Willie Mays—help us, but yes. However long it takes, we’ll wait to celebrate. And celebrate we will. “That parade down Market Street?” says Krukow. “It’s going to be stupid.”