There is one feat in baseball that becomes rarer with each passing year.

That would be winning a World Series championship in consecutive seasons — something that no MLB team has done since the New York Yankees won three straight titles in 1998, 1999 and 2000.

That’s why the past two decades haven’t seen a baseball franchise truly deserving of the ‘dynasty’ moniker — at least, not in the way the NBA had the Golden State Warriors, or the more recent dominance of the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs.

The Houston Astros came close, making three Fall Classic appearances between 2017 and 2022. Still, they never managed to go back-to-back.

But did the Chicago Cubs have a fighting chance after their 2016 World Series title?

For Anthony Rizzo, it was virtually insurmountable.

“In (2017), we rolled it back and we definitely had a World Series hangover,” Rizzo told former NFL player Johnny Manziel on the latter’s “Glory Daze Podcast.” “Anyone who wants to say there’s no such thing as a hangover is crazy, because you look at that mountain the next year … I’m like, ‘There’s no f—ing way I’m climbing this thing again.'”

Said hangover hit the Cubs like a truck when the 2017 season got underway. At the All-Star break, they were 43-45 and 5.5 games behind the NL Central-leading Milwaukee Brewers.

“You come off this insane high — the biggest high you’ll ever feel in the sports world — and you’re like, ‘Alright, now I gotta go climb all the way up there again? Let’s do this,” Rizzo said.

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The Cubs found a gear in the second half that year that saw them go 49-25 (.662) in the final 74 games of the season. They ended up clinching the division with a six-game lead over Milwaukee and eventually made it back to the NLCS in a rematch of the 2016 series against the Los Angeles Dodgers. But the Dodgers got the better of a surging Cubs team to win the series 4-1 and head to the World Series.

“They were just the better team,” Rizzo said of the Dodgers, who eventually fell to the Astros in Game 7 of the Fall Classic. “You leave it all on the field, you do everything you can.”

Manziel asked Rizzo if there were missing pieces left unacquired that could have helped the Cubs’ 2017 run.

“We went and got Wade Davis, who was one of the best closers in the game,” Rizzo said of the December 2016 trade that sent Jorge Soler to the Kansas City Royals in exchange for Davis. “He was amazing for us … But it’s literally the difference of getting Aroldis Chapman at the trade deadline and not.”

Acquiring Chapman when he was the best closer in the league was the move that perhaps tipped the scales in the Cubs’ favor in 2016. He was instrumental in their historic path to ending a 108-year championship drought, posting ridiculous numbers in just 26.2 regular-season innings: 16 saves, a 1.01 ERA (418 ERA+), 0.82 WHIP and 46 strikeouts.

“We’re the best team, and we go out and get the best closer and we’re like, ‘Holy s–t, no one’s gonna beat us,'” Rizzo said.

But in 2017, Chapman was gone. The Cubs still had their core trio of Rizzo, Kris Bryant and Javier Báez, but the lack of adding a game-changer was one of the things that shut the back-to-back window.

The Cubs made some moves ahead of the 2017 deadline, including getting starter Jose Quintana from the White Sox. Still, they were far from the best team in the league at that point.

“When you’re that good, that boost is everything to a team,” Rizzo said. “And then there are years when we’re in that same position and they don’t give us that boost.

“Could we have won more? Yeah, but what team has gone back-to-back since the Yankees?” Rizzo said. “No one has. It just didn’t work out.”