By EDDIE PELLS

The Associated Press

DENVER – It’s October in Colorado. The Broncos are playing. Snow showers are in the forecast. The leaves are turning red, yellow and brown.

The dominant color in the Mile High City these days, though, is purple.

It’s “Rocktober” in Colorado.

The Rockies, crazy as it sounds, are in the World Series.

No Curse of the Bambino. No Wrigley Field goat. Just pure Rockies magic.

Sad-sack losers almost all their 15 seasons of existence, the Rockies have won 21 of 22 games and seven in a row in the playoffs.

Suddenly, it’s cool to wear a black and purple Rockies cap around town. First baseman Todd Helton is a bigger star than the Broncos quarterback, Jay Cutler.

“I didn’t see this happening,” Colorado fan Jeff Zebrowksi said before the Rockies defeated Arizona on Monday night to win the National League pennant and make it to baseball’s biggest stage. “Maybe two or three years from now, but not now. We’re too young as a team.”

As fantastic and unlikely as it may seem to that handful of long-suffering season-ticket holders who watched their team veer from early success to unbecoming circus act to essentially irrelevant, it carries an even more poignant meaning in a city that cruelly flirted with baseball for decades, only to have its heart broken again and again.

Today, the thought of the one-time purveyors of the unwatchable, four-hour, 12-11 slugfest in the World Series sounds every bit as outlandish and tantalizing as the idea 30 years ago that Major League Baseball would someday land in Denver.

But Denver finally did get its team. And no the city stands one step from the next baseball milestone in what has been an emotional, memory-filled ride for any native who also happens to be a sports fan.

It’s “Rocktober” in Colorado.

The World Series is coming to Denver.