There was a long hard time when I kept far from me the remembrance of what I had thrown away when I was quite ignorant of its worth.

– Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

The Denver Nuggets are about to learn a lesson the Colorado Avalanche and Denver Broncos have learned all too well. Now that you’ve climbed all the way to the top, Expectations with a capital E are changed for you and your fanbase forever. And occasionally the flip side of that can throw a greater twist than even Oliver might like to experience. Once you’ve shown that fan base what ultimate success tastes like, there’s really no where to go but down – or level, at best – and when that ultimate descent begins, there are words attached that can sting…

• Once-great franchise
• Has-been
• Distant memory
• Pale imitation

Etc, etc. Suddenly, you find yourself as the team being held in comparison to the dearest memory that fan base has ever experienced, you’re found to be woefully lacking. Such a fate has befallen Denver’s darlings the last several seasons. Next year will be the eighth since the ghost of Peyton Manning and a top-five all-time defense carried the Broncos to their third Championship, and the Sheriff rode off into the sunset. The following season, the team barely cracked .500 at 9-7, and hasn’t found themselves on the plus side of that number to wrap up any season since. Disappointing? More disappointing than a 7-11 pre-wrap sandwich that’s probably turkey? Maybe ham.

Which was why last year’s team rode into town with such great – and in hindsight, ludicrous – expectations. When Denver finally brought a franchise-defining quarterback like Russell Wilson into the fold, and would be pairing his instant offense with a defense that was nearly perfect on paper, it was no wonder everyone felt the tide had finally turned before the team even took the field. At this point, we Broncos fans are pretty Pavlovian when you bring in those franchise quarterbacks, as it’s been the only time we’ve ever gotten dinner with that bell. Elway and Manning turned the tides in this town (nearly) instantaneously. Wilson’s brains and talents were obviously another success story, no?

Manning’s Denver and Wilson’s Denver turned out to be a tale of two cities. Manning not only shifted the play on the field, but the spirit and focus of the franchise. Wilson’s entrance came with multiple tales of his involvement at every level, but as the team struggled to find early success, suddenly Russ’ presence was more maligned than sought after. As the season kept slipping, Denver became one of just a handful of teams in history to release their rookie head coach before his first season was fully complete. Wilson took more than his share of the blame for a team whose season sputtered to a 5-12 record. Great expectations indeed.

So what are realistic expectations for this team, after having gone through a multitude of lows since that last high? By the end of last season’s debacle, the entire team was as flat as a sheaf of papers, so low a pickwick couldn’t have pulled them out of it. Can a new and decidedly different leader in head coach Sean Payton change their fortunes? Can Wilson return to a form that he hasn’t seen in a few seasons behind an offensive guru like Payton and a hopefully-vastly-improved offensive line? Can the defense that looks so good on paper survive another bumpy start?

We’ll start to find out about all of that and more as Denver kicks off their preseason tonight against the Arizona Cardinals. Payton, Wilson, and the rest of the orange and blue have different plans for how this particular story might turn out, and hope to find themselves still joyful enough for a Christmas carol by the end of December. When you get away from the local bias, most national pundits are a little circumspect the Broncos can even exceed .500 this year.

If they can at least exceed those expectations? That would be just great. Broncos fans might love that like the dickens.