Oct. 21, 2015. is the date Marty McFly arrived in the future in 1989’s “Back to the Future Part II”. Could art be imitating/predicting real life?

If the Cubs defeat the Pittsburgh Pirates in tonight’s do-or-die wild-card playoff, they’ll face the Cardinals in a best-of-five division series starting Friday.

Back to the Future II was written by a lifelong Cardinals fan, Bob Gale, who “wanted to come up with one of the most unlikely scenarios” for predicting the 2015 World Series champion in the 1989 film’s script. Gale’s pick: the Chicago Cubs, who haven’t won a World Series since 1908.

Well, the Cubs are actually in the playoffs this year, and begin their prospective march to the Fall Classic tonight with a loser-out game in Pittsburgh. “If the Cubs do make it, then I’m a visionary,” Gale joked to The Daily Herald. “Life imitates art, as they say.”

Jake Arrieta, tonight’s starting pitcher, said back in January that the coincidence between the 1989 movie and the 2015 season is “crazy, to say the least.”

The Cubs’ game tonight starts at 7:08p, on TBS. As more than one really smart tweeter has pointed out, that is an amazing coincidence:

“107 years after 1908, @Cubs play on 10/7 with a game time of 19:08. WHAT IS HAPPENING?”

Chicago’s cursed Cubs don’t make the postseason too often. At the University of Illinois, a student politely requested that his professor postpone their Thursday midterm on account of the game which he had tickets for, and the instructor gladly obliged. “If it were any other team, I would hesitate,” he wrote. “But the universe only gives Cubs fans so many postseason games. They must be savored.” The test has now been rescheduled for Friday afternoon.

Sadly we can’t exactly imitate the movie. The earliest this year’s World Series could end is Oct. 31. Still, go CUBS!