You know what the hottest baseball Twitter account was three years ago? It was Harper At Bat. The premise was so simple it was almost retro: When Washington Nationals rookie phenom Bryce Harper came to the plate, @harperatbat would spring to life.

"Apr 16, AB 1: Harper at bat!" it would scream, and we would all stop what we were doing and scramble to open MLB TV and watch him come to the plate. It is important to remember how much we all lost our minds we Harper made his Major League debut in 2012.

Yahoo! Sports: "Bryce Harper was born for this, built for this, trained for this and anointed to this. … This is what he was meant to be, and where it was meant to be."

USA Today: "President Obama stepping on a major league field is not a novelty anymore. Bryce Harper doing so is."

Don't forget THE TOP 30 PHOTOS OF BRYCE HARPER'S DEBUT

Harper was 19 years old and ready to break sh-t; the most hyped prospect in the history of the game, featured in GQ magazine (in bizarre photos accompanied by a story written by an idiot), dubbed the LeBron Of Baseball. He was going to change the game in every possible way.

And I followed @harperatbat like everybody else did. Who didn't want to see the kid hit? By the end of the season, I expected him to sprout wings and breathe fire. This was going to be amazing. There is nothing like a prospect.

Harper is now in his fourth season with the Nats, and he has put above-average seasons on the board all four years. (He leads the league in strikeouts this season and is only hitting .237, but he still has a 115 OPS-plus and leads the team in homers. Also, the season's only 10 games old.) He has won a National League Rookie of the Year Award, made two All-Star teams and was picked by many observers to win the NL MVP Award this season. He also is capable of doing this:

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Harper is, still, as talented a player as we have seen in the game of baseball in a long, long time. And nobody cares anymore.

Seriously, look at poor @harperatbat these days. It's still plugging along, alerting 742 mostly spam-account followers every time Harper comes to the plate. It is the sad sound of a tree falling in a forest.

Apr 16, AB 4: Harper at bat! - HarperAtBat (@HarperAtBat) April 17, 2015

Apr 16, AB 4: Bryce Harper strikes out swinging. - HarperAtBat (@HarperAtBat) April 17, 2015

Harper, who has been a terrific ballplayer for more than three years now, feels like some sort of disappointment. We've all seen him bat too many times now. (1,533 plate appearances, to be exact.) He's old news. Harper was once the most thrilling prospect in baseball. Now, boringly, he's just a guy who plays it every day. What's exciting about that? He's yesterday's newspaper.

Also, Harper is 10 months younger than Kris Bryant.

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Bryant is clearly going to be an outstanding baseball player. He has battered Minor League pitching since the Cubs drafted him No. 2 overall in 2013 -- he hit 43 Minor League homers last season and batted .325, which is terrifying --and he was the talk of Spring Training, bashing home runs deep into the Mesa, Ariz., air on a regular basis. There was much discussion about the Cubs' decision to keep him in the Minors for what was pretty obviously a service-time manipulation -- Bryant even voiced his annoyance, not that many noticed with Scott Boras yelling so loudly -- but no one will remember that in a week, or even tomorrow. Bryant is here, and the rest is noise.

The young third baseman comes with an extra level of excitement because he is a Chicago Cub. The team has a trove of prospects, all with their own talents and limitations, but none of them are Bryant, the top prospect in the game and as close a can't-miss future superstar as the game permits. ESPN's Keith Law and Baseball America have Bryant at No. 1 on their top 100 lists. The Cubs are one of baseball's most storied franchises, but they're exciting now because they have so much young talent. Their future seems limitless.

But, of course, there is a limit, like there is a limit to all of us, because we are all stupid, clumsy human beings. Bryant right now lives in our fantasies; we can attach whatever we want to him -- and the Cubs -- and we can't be disproven. Soon, he'll be a dull old reality. Bryant will be just be a guy who we see on our television screens every day. And then we'll wonder what's next.

Right now, Bryant isn't a baseball player, or even a human being. He's a phenomenon. He is anticipation incarnate. Bryant is that cute little robot thing from the Star Wars trailer (who has five times more Twitter followers than @harperatbat, by the way); we haven't seen much of him, which means we believe him to capable of anything.

Here is Baseball America's top overall prospect for the last 15 years:

2015: Kris Bryant

2014: Byron Buxton

2013: Jurickson Profar

2012: Bryce Harper

2011: Bryce Harper

2010: Jason Heyward

2009: Matt Wieters

2008: Jay Bruce

2007: Daisuke Matsuzaka

2006: Delmon Young

2005: Joe Mauer

2004: Joe Mauer

2003: Mark Teixeira

2002: Josh Beckett

2001: Josh Hamilton

2000: Rick Ankiel

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Pay Attention to These Fast Starts Very little in this world lends itself to a reliable conclusion at an early stage. So given that we're only… More» There are some terrific ballplayers there. I don't see any future Hall of Famers yet, but everyone on that list, even Delmon Young, has done something in the Majors to be proud of -- other than the three most recent ones. But none of the bottom 11 guys get you excited anymore. Heyward, Harper and Wieters are more known for what they aren't than what they are. Mauer, Teixeira and Beckett all have had solid careers, but nothing you'd write poems about. (Josh Hamilton and Rick Ankiel, for their own special reasons, are sort of outliers here.) Everyone on that list has given you something to complain about. Except two: Bryant and Byron Buxton. Just because they haven't reached the Majors yet.

Even our superstars aren't as exciting once they reach the Majors. Mike Trout is one of the greatest baseball players of all time, already. (He's 23 and already about to pass Trevor Hoffman, Tino Martinez and Bobby Bonilla in WAR.) We are watching a living legend, every night. And look: There's a Trout at-bat tracker. It has fewer followers than Harper's. Trout is wiping out every single notion we think we know about baseball, essentially every night … and we're already used to him. We've already moved on.

Bryant is going to be fantastic, and Cubs fans are right to be excited about him, and everything else happening with their surging franchise. But what is happening now, this frenzy, it's going to pass, and it's going to pass quickly. We'll watch Bryant's at-bats with fervid attention … for about a month or so. Then we'll wonder when Buxton is coming, or Joey Gallo, or Addison Russell, or Miguel Sano. We'll look forward to them and move on from Bryant … even as Bryant just gets better and better. Baseball has always had the problem of looking backward in nostalgia rather than seeing what's happening on the field right in front of it. Now we've added the affliction of living in fantasy about an impossible future than appreciating what we have. Bryant is exciting and amazing and otherworldly talented, and we're totally going to forget about him in a month because he cannot fly and breathe fire.

@bryantatbat exists, by the way. You should follow it. Today is going to be wonderful for checking out the updates. And then you can remember, in July, that you forgot to unfollow the account, and start up @galloatbat. Everybody gather around your computers! The future is here! Again!

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Email me at leitch@sportsonearth.com , follow me @williamfleitch or just shout out your window real loud, I'll hear you. Point is, let's talk.