Every year at Hall of Fame time, the Expos connection endures

There will come a time when no Expos players accomplished enough to even be seriously considered for the Hall of Fame will still be standing, when the last slender threads tying the former franchise to baseball greatness will be severed.

But that moment has not come. Not yet. At the moment, we are in the fire-sale phase of "what might have beens" in the team's history. And it's rich.

This summer, two newly-minted Hall of Famers with Expos ties will head to Cooperstown, NY (a quick five-hour drive from Montreal) in Randy Johnson and one of the most popular players in Expos history, Pedro Martinez.

The various campgrounds and motels that dot the Cooperstown area are probably already fielding phone calls from the 514 and 450 area codes.

Johnson's connection is older, and more tenuous, of course. He was an Expo for a blink of an eye, a long way from the Big Unit he would become, after leaving in that now-infamous Mark Langston trade back in 1989.

His phlegmatic personality would never have made him beloved, even if he had stayed. And his lack of sentimentality about his time in Montreal in the years after the trade never particularly endeared him after the fact. And he most assuredly wouldn't go in wearing an Expos' cap.

But he was once an Expo. And that's good enough.

Martinez is a completely different story. Although he was only an Expo for four seasons, he adored it here. He was devastated to leave. And even though the bulk of what is now officially a Hall of Fame career was spent in the major markets of Boston and New York, he never forgot. And he has never been forgotten.

Fans will still remember the day he came back.

It was, May 4, 1998 and suddenly, the fans sitting near the Expos' dugout for an otherwise nondescript early-season game noticed that Carlos Perez, the left-hander who inherited the No. 1 starter's job, left the dugout and went to speak to a man sitting in the first row, two sections to the left.

It was Pedro.

The roar began, and grew and grew as the announced crowd of 6,616 that sounded like three times that many, rose to their feet.

Martinez had pitched the previous day in Boston. He hopped a puddle-jumper to Montreal – a "real shaky plane", he remembered – to say the adieus he never had a chance to say when he was traded to the Red Sox the previous off-season, to thank the fans for the Cy Young award they had been such a big part of.

How many players can you think of who would do that? And he did even more. After the game, Martinez went into the clubhouse and gave the very young team a pep talk.

The Expos won that game, against the Cincinnati Reds, in the bottom of the ninth.

Johnson and Martinez were voted in without drama, in their first year of eligibility.

It is Tim Raines, though, whose yearly disappointment touches the hearts of every fan.

Every year around this time, when Raines is back in the news, Expos fans almost physically will him to make it so they can pull out the old No. 30 regalia and make one more pilgrimage to Cooperstown to remember him.

He is a Hall of Fame underdog much in the way the Expos and their fans were baseball's underdog – surely underrated, certainly disrespected. He's one of the players they almost feel guilty about, even though he remains on the bubble through no fault of theirs.

So many of Raines's dominant, Hall-of-Fame worthy years went underreported way up here in Canada, a long way away from the bright American baseball spotlight in the days before the Internet turned us into one big baseball planet.

This was the eighth year of Raines's eligibility and now that the timeframe has been reduced from 15 years to 10, he no longer has seven shots to make it, only two.

He was closer this year, rallying up to 55 per cent of eligible votes after dropping from 52.2 percent in 2013 to 46.1 per cent in 2014. But Raines remains more than a prayer or two away from that magic 75 per cent mark.

Expos fans have been here before – twice in the last decade alone. First there was Gary Carter, who spent 11 seasons in Montreal and was finally elected in his sixth attempt in 2003. He wore the Expos' cap reluctantly. But he wore it.

That year, Andre Dawson received 50 per cent of the vote. Seven infernally long years later, on his ninth attempt, Dawson made it, too. And the fans went to Cooperstown again.

Now, four years later, two more are in. There won't be many chances left. And the fans know it.

As they suffer along with Raines, they have a soft spot for Larry Walker, the Canadian who was in his third year of eligibility this year. He, too, was another fire-sale casualty – or more accurately, a '94 strike casualty. And although most of his numbers, whatever earns him any consideration for Cooperstown, came in mile-high Denver, he remains an Expo.

Walker received 11.8 per cent of the vote this year – enough to keep him on the ballot another year, but not nearly enough to hold out any kind of real hope.

Once Raines and Walker disappear – and Raines may yet, somehow, squeeze in – who's left?

The final years of the Expos saw the coming to fruition of the last crop of players the team's farm system produced. Not a great crop, but a good crop nonetheless: Jose Vidro, Michael Barrett, Orlando Cabrera, Javier Vazquez.

That they're all in their late 30s now, all retired, is just a shocking snapshot of the passage of time because when I began covering the team in 1998, we were all baseball rookies together – they younger than I, in their early 20s.

But there was one.

Vladimir Guerrero.

Guerrero was beloved in a way that transcended the significant language barrier – his, not the fans' – as the transcendent man-child who did wondrous things on the baseball diamond.

He was for many years the only true reason to come out to desolate Olympic Stadium, a superstar who on any given night might do something you'd never seen before.

When he left – a year before the franchise left – it was as though all the air went out of things even if the team's history still had to be played out.

Guerrero's first year of eligibility will be 2017. His credentials surely be hotly debated, although they are significant both in a tangible and intangible way. He played more seasons in Montreal than he did in Anaheim, even if his exploits there were more highly celebrated.

But his years in Montreal were on a different plane. He had his speed then, his youthful abandon, and he played right field like few before him ever did – for better, and sometimes for worse.

So until at least then, and likely well beyond, the Expos will remain part of the Hall of Fame conversation.

Perhaps Major League Baseball will have returned to Montreal by then. It's unlikely, but certainly not impossible. And if it does, the conversation will continue unbroken.