For Washington Nationals and their fans, the dog days are over For generations, that sweltering summer happiness - the hot, competitive kind - was always somewhere else. Now, it's here. Now, it's the Nats who want to go to Baltimore this weekend with the Orioles in a three-game losing streak and send them onto the skids. They beat us here two of three [in May]. I'd like to return the favor," Manager Davey Johnson said. Asked if he'd ever set foot back inside Camden Yards in 15 years since Peter Angelos fired him, he said, "Time flies." Then Johnson paused to think. He'd obviously never gone back. His temperate words in the years since have been baseball politics. "I went to the reunion of the "70 [title] team," he said. Did we stay for the game? So, he's been back, but not really. This will be the first time, and as manager of the team Angelos tried to keep out of his "territory." Little payback? Baseball is meant for summer, for heat, beer in the stands and tempers that get short in a hurry. It's meant for fusses and rivalries, for Joe Maddon to call Johnson "cowardly" and his Nats players "rats" for finking on the Rays" Joel Peralta on Tuesday night. On Thursday, "Peraltar" was officially notified he'd be suspended for eight games for all the pine tar umps found in his glove after Johnson, on tips from some Nats, asked for a frisk. Maddon's words for Johnson were mildly unprintable. Davey shrugged it off ("check the rulebook") but termed Maddon "kind of a weird wuss." Bad teams, and second-tier managers, don't ask for pitcher frisks or spend 48 hours sparring in the press. But managers who've ridden teams to the World Series, like Maddon and Johnson, take pains not to be one-upped. In towns with bad teams, fans may still love the sport, especially its capacity for surprise, even in the 1000th game you've seen. But they wish they could taste the real thing. In D.C., the wait has been so long that the question has arisen: "What is the real thing? Would we know it if it arrived? You know it's the real thing because at game time with the temperature 97 degrees a third straight big weekday crowd shows up - more than 80,000 for three dates with the high-talent, low-draw Rays. When you're in last place in mid-June, nothing matters. But in first place, everything matters. Each game is magnified, not diminished by the day-after-day schedule. Nothing is too small to care about.