One or two of the above columns is sure to look foolish by November. That’s just the way sports go: We live in the moment, and we judge based on some mix of whatever merit a team has earned in the present and whatever respect a team has accumulated in the past.

“It’s a tough time for skeptics,” The Buffalo News‘ Jerry Sullivan writes, and while he’s speaking directly of the upstart Bills he covers, he could very well be writing about dozens of teams in numerous sports throughout the country. (Did you know Old Dominion was ranked No. 1 in field hockey, ahead of giants such as North Carolina and Maryland?)

Here, we present five stories trying, with a degree of restraint, to make broad judgments based on two to four games. (In the case of the Los Angeles Angels, those would be their remaining ones of the season.) It’s a tough time for skeptics in Buffalo, but it’s also a tough time for believers in Atlanta or College Park, Md.