I want to be very careful about what I’m about to say, because I’ve been burned before. I’ve been burned by the ‘03 Cubs. I’ve been burned by every Bears quarterback since McMahon. I’ve been burned by three different “this is the year” White Sox rosters that turned out to be “this is the year we trade everyone at the deadline” rosters. So I’m going to say this slowly, and I want you to understand that I’m saying it with the full weight of a man who has watched Chicago sports for the better part of five decades and has learned, at great personal cost, that hope is a trap.

The Chicago Fire are winning football matches. Real ones. Against teams that are also trying to win.

Hugo Cuypers — a Belgian whose name I had to look up how to spell three weeks ago and whom I now consider a close personal friend — has scored in four consecutive games. Four. The Fire beat the Philadelphia Union 2-1 on Saturday in a match that I did not watch live because it was on at 7:30 p.m. and I was at Schaller’s, but that I have since watched the highlights of twice, which is two more times than I have watched Chicago Fire highlights in the previous calendar year combined.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I am not what you’d call a soccer guy. I grew up on the South Side watching the Sox and the Bears and occasionally the Hawks when tickets were cheap enough that you could justify freezing in the old Stadium. Soccer was something that happened in other countries, and then it was something that happened at Soldier Field in front of 11,000 people, half of whom appeared to be there because they’d gotten the wrong tickets. I once asked my nephew to explain the offside rule to me and he talked for twenty minutes and by the end I understood less than when I started.

But here’s the thing about sports in this city: we don’t care what the sport is. We care whether you’re trying. We care whether you show up. We care whether you look like you’d rather be somewhere else, which, in the case of the Fire for most of the last decade, they very much did. The rosters turned over like pancakes at a church breakfast. The coaches lasted about as long as a snow forecast in April. The whole operation had the energy of a restaurant that’s already decided to close but hasn’t told the waitstaff yet.

And now Cuypers is out there scoring goals like a man who has just discovered that the net is, in fact, the target, and the rest of the team is running around like they’ve collectively realized that this sport can be played with enthusiasm. They’re pressing. They’re passing. They’re doing the thing where they slide on their knees after a goal, which I have to say looks painful on that Soldier Field turf but which I respect as a commitment to the bit.

Is it sustainable? I don’t know. Probably not. This is Chicago, and the gravitational pull of mediocrity is stronger here than anywhere else on earth. The Fire will probably lose four in a row starting next week, and Cuypers will pull a hamstring, and the crowds will thin back out to the point where you can hear individual conversations from across the stadium. That’s the cycle. That’s what we do here. We get just enough hope to make the disappointment interesting.

But right now — right now, on this specific Sunday in March, with the wind coming off the lake and the city still shaking off a winter that overstayed its welcome — the Fire are in the top half of the Eastern Conference, and a Belgian forward I couldn’t have picked out of a lineup a month ago is the most exciting athlete in Chicago. And if you’d told me that in January, I would have asked what you were drinking and whether I could have some.

I’ll be watching the next match. From Schaller’s, obviously — I’m not going to Soldier Field in March, I’m not insane. But I’ll be watching. And if Cuypers scores again, I might just learn how to pronounce his name.