I am not one for moral victories once a team becomes a viable contender, but this Cubs team is still growing. They are still young. This is not a veteran team with a limited upside or window of opportunity. They're still value in learning through loss.

And I think they found something out about themselves and their rivals in this past series.

Unlike the previous series, the Cubs kept coming after the Cardinals. They kept grinding away whether they were winning or losing. They were literally one good pitch or one key situational piece of hitting from taking this series, but in the very end they came away with just a split, an outcome that favors the first place Cardinals.

They lost the battle.

In the process, however, they have humanized the Cardinals, a team that fancies itself as having some sort of winning mystique. Even I bought into it for awhile. We all did. We secretly admired it while derisively calling it black magic or voodoo. We all seemed to believe that somehow, someway the Cardinals were going to win -- as if it was something supernatural and beyond the Cubs control.

But yesterday's meltdown may have exposed a chink in the armor, a sense of entitlement that seems to pervade the Cardinals organization.

It took three pitches on Wednesday for Wacha, Molina to realize they would be dealing with a tight strike zone: http://t.co/DZ4jJV4x1s — Jenifer Langosch (@LangoschMLB) July 9, 2015

According at least to the ESPN tracker, those pitches were outside the zone and borderline at best. But hey, the Cardinals aren't exactly shy about getting competitive edges that are all too earthly, by any means necessary, whether it is hacking computers or throwing a fit and trying to intimidate a young ump into expanding the strike zone for their pitchers. That hubris and expectation of special privilege is only more tarnish to their carefully contrived image as the symbol of all that is good in baseball.

Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.

The Cardinals are human and they are indeed flawed, more so than we dared imagine. They never worried about needing every competitive edge to beat the Cubs in the past. But they do now. The Molina/Matheny meltdown made that clear. And in the long run, that knowledge may be the biggest victory that emerges from their battles with their rivals -- yes, we can call them that again with a straight face.

The Cubs, meanwhile, are starting to believe there is something a little magical about their own season. In a sport where superstition and tradition seem especially prevalent, believing in yourself can't hurt. But losing some of the belief in the Cardinals winning mystique can be just as important. The Cards may have salvaged a tie in this series, but they have shown themselves to be quite vulnerable in every sense of the word. And while St. Louis may have opened too large a lead by now, likely too large to overcome in 2015, the Cubs are going to keep coming -- and the Cardinals have to know now that they are not going away anytime soon.

They better get used to it.