CHICAGO – The Milwaukee Brewers learned a valuable lesson last week.

Don’t mess with the “L” flag.

It might have been coincidence that the Brewers were swept in four games by the Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League Championship Series after taking a team photo with the “L” flag following their division series-clinching win over the Chicago Cubs.

The “L” flag didn’t factor into any of Shohei Ohtani’s three majestic home runs Friday in the Dodgers’ NLCS-clinching win, or any of his 10 strikeouts over six scoreless innings. And surely the flag had nothing to do with a Brewers fan losing her job after going viral for threatening to call ICE on a Dodgers fan who turned out to be a U.S. citizen and a veteran of two wars.

But considering all the bad things that happened to baseball’s best regular-season team after the “L” flag incident at American Family Field, it makes you wonder.

The “L” flag, for those not paying attention, is the sad cousin of the “W” flag that Cubs fans fly at Wrigley Field after wins. The tradition began in the 1930s, when the Cubs started flying a “W” or “L” atop the center-field scoreboard to let riders on the “L” know whether the team had won or lost that day.

It was a tradition few players thought about until 1998, when Cubs closer Rod Beck suggested flying the “L” flag was “bad karma.”

“I’m not blaming anything for it,” Beck said. “But I’m a believer in positive energy and karma. When you lose a ballgame and fly an ‘L’ over the park, you leave a bad aura around the ballpark, and it can go all the way into the next day.”

“They do it, obviously, so the people on the (train) can see whether we won or lost,” he said. “It’s a good theory, but maybe they can change it to where they can drive by, and when they don’t see any flag, they can assume it’s an ‘L.’ Or maybe they can fly a ‘W’ for ‘Wanted to win.’”

Beck wasn’t serious, but he was a man who enjoyed stirring debate.

“It’s not a strong theory,” he told me. “But it’s something to make you think.”

Beck’s idea was largely ignored until 2008, when the Cubs marked the 100th anniversary of their last championship season and fielded a team good enough to end the drought. In July of that year, with the Cubs in first place, team executives considered ending the “L” flag tradition after losses but decided to leave it alone. Instead of blaming the flag, they turned their attention to the Billy Goat curse.

Before Game 1 of the 2008 NL Division Series against the Dodgers at Wrigley Field, unbeknownst to general manager Jim Hendry and manager Lou Piniella, Cubs executives Crane Kenney and Mike Lufrano invited a Greek Orthodox priest onto the field for a pregame ceremony to bless the Cubs dugout with holy water and remove the curse.

Long story short – it didn’t work.

“Now, I’m just another Cubbie occurrence,” the priest, Rev. James Greanias, told the Chicago Tribune that night.

The Cubs were swept in three games by the Dodgers and didn’t return to the playoffs for seven years.

The “L” flag faded back into semi-obscurity until 2017, when Brewers fans began bringing them to what was then Miller Park in response to the large number of Cubs fans attending Cubs-Brewers games. The trolling picked up steam in 2018 as the rivalry intensified under Brewers manager Craig Counsell.

But mocking the Cubs was something fans did – not the players.

After the Brewers beat the Cubs last week in Game 5 of the NLDS, they brought an “L” flag onto the field, and reliever Trevor Megill held it high for the team photo. The Brewers’ X account (@Brewers) then trolled the Cubs by tweeting the photo and posting an AI-generated video of an “L” flag covering Chicago’s Bean sculpture with the caption, “HEY CHICAGO, WHADAYA SAY?”

MLB’s X account (@MLB) joined in, tweeting its own clip with a laughing emoji.

It was all in good fun, though the backlash from Cubs fans suggested many weren’t amused. Counsell and Cubs players had congratulated and complimented the Brewers after the series, so to some, the trolling by Brewers players and the team’s social media staff felt classless and beneath a professional franchise.

Would the Cubs have mocked the Brewers had they won? Doubtful. Would their social media team have piled on? Possibly.

We’ll never know.

Either way, the controversy seemed bound to fade until next season – when, inevitably, it would resurface once the teams met again. But the Brewers lost the first two NLCS games at home to the Dodgers, and the fan who threatened to call ICE quickly became infamous. Cubs fans helped amplify the video, which soon went viral nationwide.

When the Brewers lost Game 3 at Dodger Stadium, more fans joined in, linking the woman – nicknamed “Brewers Karen” – to what they dubbed the “curse of the ‘L’ flag.” Game 4 became an instant classic thanks to Ohtani’s performance, and Milwaukee’s dream season ended in disappointment. The Brewers scored just four runs on 14 hits across the four games.

“The pitching performances by the Dodgers basically put the hammer down,” Brewers manager Pat Murphy said afterward.

True enough. The Dodgers were the superior team and proved it in the NLCS. They’ll head into the World Series as favorites over the Seattle Mariners or Toronto Blue Jays, and MLB can only hope the series isn’t as short and lopsided as the NLCS. A ratings flop seems likely if it’s another sweep.

The “L” flag will no doubt return to American Family Field when the Cubs and Brewers meet again in 2026, now cemented in Brewers lore just as the curse-busting episode of 2008 became part of Cubs history.

Kenney later called it “one of the dumbest things” he’d ever done, taking responsibility for the idea.

Will Megill and the Brewers one day admit that holding up an “L” flag for a team photo was one of the dumbest things they’ve ever done?

Check back in spring training.