The Colorado Rockies believed. It made no sense. They believed anyway.

When general manager Dan O’Dowd fired manager Clint Hurdle on May 29, the Rockies looked on their way to another long, depressing summer.

They had lost 28 of 46 games. They had just been demolished by the Los Angeles Dodgers in a three-game series.

The Rockies surrendered 31 runs while looking ready to surrender, period.

Strange, the Rockies still believed they could make the playoffs. So did Jim Tracy, the manager who saw promise amid the wreckage.

The Rockies finished 74-42 under Tracy’s calm yet forceful direction. They changed a gloomy baseball summer into one of the great surprises in Colorado sports history.

And there’s no good reason to believe the march will stop. The Rockies head to Philadelphia with a strong chance to rule the National League again.

Tracy cringed when asked how much credit he deserves.

“I don’t want any credit,” he said. “I don’t want any.”

Later, though, Tracy explained how he revived the Rockies.

“It’s not the easiest thing in the world to take a group of people … and convince them that we can still get this done and that you guys are a hell of a lot better than what you’ve shown up to this point.”

He shook his head.

“That’s not the easiest thing in the world.”

But that’s what he did.

Tracy inherited a group of believers. Tracy had crazy visions for the rest of 2009. So did his players.

I expected Tracy to shake up the lineup. I expected Tracy to campaign for a mass purging.

He took the opposite approach. He stated his complete faith in the team given to him.

The Rockies were playing awful but saw themselves beating everyone. They remembered, even in their days of agony early this season, the great days of October 2007.

That’s when the Rockies stunned everyone — including themselves — by riding all the way to the World Series.Shortstop Troy Tulowitzki relaxed in front of his locker as he explained his team’s stubborn self-belief.

“I really didn’t get why we weren’t playing better,” he said, thinking back to the Rockies’ performance under Hurdle. “We weren’t pitching. We weren’t playing good defense. We weren’t getting the timely hits.”

Tulowitzki laughed. He knows it sounds absurd to say he always believed.

“But I knew we definitely had the ability to be in the position that we’re in right now. I can’t tell you that it’s been a real surprise to me.”

Tracy, Tulowitzki said, has been the key figure in the turnaround.

“He’s done great things for us. We want to play hard for him. Not that we didn’t want to play hard for Hurdle, but Tracy’s had our backs from Day 1. He believed in us, and I think that was huge. When he took over, he really saw the same thing that we saw.”

Second baseman Clint Barmes is hesitant to criticize Hurdle, but says the team’s outlook changed the day Tracy took over.

“Once the change was made, there seemed to be a lot of release,” Barmes said. “The energy wasn’t there before, but the energy started to come back and the confidence started to build.”

Give Tracy credit. He was the expert architect.

He constructed confidence.

Air Academy’s Tyler Steigerwald, right, gives a pep talk to teammate Cam Harrell during the final day of the boys’ 5A Golf Championship. Harrell finished tied for ninth. Photo by MARK REIS, THE GAZETTE