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Prior to the weekend of June 28-30 2008, “The Battle of the Beltway” was nothing but a marketing slogan attached to a lifeless interleague match-up between two hapless ball clubs.

Now? Well, it’s a reference to a potential rivalry between the Orioles and the Nationals, two teams that remain, admittedly, quite hapless. I know, this doesn’t sound like the enthusiastic review that normally precedes a “this is when it all started” declaration, but in sports, nothing is more transparent than melodrama. (Someone please pass this note to ESPN).

Still, we'll look back at this weekend, the first series between the teams at the new Nationals ballpark (have you been to this stadium, by the way? They're literally building a new city from scratch along the Anacostia. It's incredible), and remember it as the birth of a rivalry that seemed like it would never happen.

The Orioles are still a 4th-place team. The Nationals are still the worst team in baseball. But that didn't stop 40,000 fans from packing Nationals Park in three consecutive nights, re-breaking the young park's attendance record with each contest.

With fans in the seats--impressionable minds looking for a reason to care about baseball in the region-- the players needed only satisfy the fans’ thirst for competition. Both franchises need this rivalry to develop into a lucrative endeavor. The Nationals haven't solidified themselves in the Redskins-hungry minds of Washingtonians, and Baltimoreans have tuned-out the O's in ways that would have been unimaginable to Brooks Robinson, Eddie Murray, and the Ironman.

So, when Sunday came and the two clubs had a rubber-match to play in front of 40,000 red, blue, orange, and black fans, it became essential that they deliver a competitive game.

12 innings later the Nationals won on a walk-off home run after the Orioles took the lead in the top of the inning. At the time, the orange-and-black half of the stadium was on its feet, applauding in anticipation of the game’s last pitch. A misplaced curve ball and a line drive just inside the left field foul pole later, the red-and-blue half marched through the concourse, goading their I-95 brethren with playful cheers.

Or not so playful: I heard one guy turn the familiar 5-count cheer "Let's-Go-Or-Ee-Oles" into "Cess-pool-Balt-I-More." Clever.

But that's what a match-up needs to become a rivalry. Proximity alone doesn't make a rivalry, though it certainly helps. Real rivalries are born by memorable games, brash personalities, and high stakes contests.

At the moment, the Os and Nats have exactly one memorable game. Neither team has a high-profile player worthy of garnering disdain from the opposition, and neither team is good, meaning the stakes, for now, are obscenely low. But rivalries have to be born somewhere, sometime.

The cities already carry a famous-big-brother versus scorned-little-brother relationship. Fans of the Ravens already loathe the Redskins, and vice-versa. Between the two cities exists a geographical grey area, full of people who invariably carry a particular allegiance to one city over the other. Nationals fans will always remember the way Orioles owner Peter Angelos publicly campaigned to keep baseball out of D.C. Orioles fans can logically retort that the Redskins franchise for years did the same to football in Baltimore. The culmination of these realities is a fertile soil within which a rivalry may bloom, assuming the teams ever become competitive.

Their positions in the standings for the last decade, if you count the Nationals history as the Montreal Expos, may make you weary that this can happen, but history shows us that professional sports run in cycles. No one stays bad forever.

Who has hope for this rivalry?