The last team to feel a bit like the Milwaukee Brewers felt on Thursday night, at least based on what they accomplished on paper, was the 1968 Los Angeles Lakers.
The feat: Sweep the same team that had swept you out of the prior postseason.
One irony, of course, is that the Brewers did it against the Los Angeles Dodgers — a bit of delayed balancing out of the sports universe, if you will.
And even those Lakers didn’t do it in a seven-game series — the 1967 meeting had only been best-of-five.
But still, let’s take a bit of a trip in a cross-sports time machine here.
Brewers Match Lakers History
This is the stat from OptaStats that explains exactly what the Brewers accomplished:
The @Brewers are the first MLB/NBA/NHL team to sweep an opponent that swept them in the previous postseason since the Lakers did so in the 1968 Western Division Finals against the Warriors.
— OptaSTATS (@OptaSTATS) October 16, 2026
Milwaukee had its postseason ended a year ago by the Dodgers in convincing fashion. And now this year, they reversed it entirely to send the back-to-back champs home.
1968 Los Angeles Lakers
The Lakers had to defeat the San Francisco Warriors to advance to the NBA Finals.
They won the clinching Game 4 by a 106-100 score.
In that game, Jerry West was brilliant, going for 29 points on 12-for-21 shooting and 5-for-6 from the foul line. He added seven rebounds and four assists.
Elgin Baylor put up 28 points (10-26 FG, 8-13 FT) and 20 rebounds.
Freddie Crawford added 14 points, Archie Clark had 11 and Mel Counts had nine points and 12 rebounds.
The Warriors were led by 27 from Fred Hetzel and 23 from Rudy LaRusso.
Those Lakers went on to lose in six games in the NBA Finals to the Boston Celtics and Bill Russell.
It’s worth noting that the Warriors of the year prior, when they swept the Lakers, had both Rick Barry and Nate Thurmond, neither of whom were there to stave off a sweep the following year.
2026 Milwaukee Brewers
You aren’t going to find a ton of parallels between a small-market baseball team from Milwaukee and the late-60s Lakers of West and Baylor.
Still, it’s cool to see how sports can follow its own long-ago history, even across leagues.
When a team is swept by another, you wouldn’t usually count on the tables being totally flipped just one year later, but that’s what these Brewers did, and now they’ll get to go to the World Series.
Milwaukee has never won the World Series. The only time they played in it before, 1982, was when the Brewers represented the American League and lost in seven games to the St. Louis Cardinals.
It’s a new era of baseball in Milwaukee, and they proved it by doing something that hasn’t been done in more than a half-century.
Brewers Make Sports History Not Done Since 1968 Los Angeles Lakers