DENVER • There’s history at work here, and a cold, hard history makes a person learn to expect the worst.

Going a quarter century without a division title does things to a baseball fan. It changes how you view success (what is this pleasurable feeling?) while failures seem to compound (here we go again…). The Rockies are purple and black because August usually ends up feeling like a bruise.

Even so, manager Bud Black had a fair point when he wondered aloud in the home team’s dugout at Coors Field on Monday: “We were talking about it the other day, being in a limo to Negative Town.”

“You guys seem a little down,” Black had opened. “Monday morning blues?”

Some of it’s that history we were talking about, skip. Some of it’s the bullpen. But once you remove the ice pack from your midsection, the big picture comes into focus. Looks good, too.

Here, check it out: the Rockies own 60 wins on Aug. 6 for only the second time in club history. The first time was last year, and it says here this team’s better.

Maybe this is a small thing, maybe it’s a big thing. Either way it’s a notable thing: the last time the Rockies were in a better position on Aug. 6 to win the National League West, Kyle Freeland was 3. These are the salad days, even if the bullpen right now is as appetizing as the icky white part of the lettuce.

As Freeland, now 25, took the mound Monday in a weather-delayed 2-0 win against the Pirates, I had to look it up: when’s the last time the Rockies were only two games back of first place on Aug. 6? Long ago and behold, it was 1996, so far back the National League West was still a four-team division. I could make a decent argument last year’s Rockies were the best club to play here, up to this point, and those guys were 15.5 games back on Aug. 6. Stupid Dodgers. Always ruining everything.

It’s how the Rockies lost early August games that makes folks queasy, as though they’ve seen this movie before and didn’t like the ending the first time. After taking 17 of 23 in July, the second-best winning percentage in franchise history, the Rox went on a forgettable road trip that included three walk-off losses. Each one felt like you’d banged a putter against your ankle bone. There are losses and there are who-else-hates-baseball? losses. Those were the latter.

Yet those hardly hurt the Rockies in the standings. They were one game back of the Dodgers when the road trip opened, two games back when they finally came home.

That’s not a bruise. That’s just a scraped knee, and the Rockies are rubbing some dirt on it.

“I still believe in our closer. I still believer in our bullpen,” veteran voice-of-reason Carlos Gonzalez said before first pitch at Coors Field. “Charlie (Blackmon) didn’t have a great series or a great road trip overall. That doesn’t mean we stop believing in him. This is a guy that can carry a team for a year. Sometimes you’re going to fail. There’s nothing to worry about. I’ll take these guys any day and any year. I’ll go to battle with every single guy here.”

It’s a little rah-rah, a little cheesy, but telling nonetheless. Since 1996 here’s where the Rox have stood in relation to first place on Aug. 6: 15.5, 8, 16, 19.5, 11, 19, 9, 6.5, 7.5, 7.5, 5, 3.5, 13.5, 16.5, 13.5, 17.5, 16.5, 8, 12.5, 22 and 10.5 games back. Take history into account — and we definitely always should! — two games back might as well be a 10-game lead.

Now about that bullpen. It’s tugging at the seams, the one thing that could make all this come undone. Since the Rockies front office elected to dance with its own and stand pat at the trade deadline, three developments would be awfully helpful in making the first-place Dodgers sweat. And we’re not baseball-greedy around here. Two of three would do:

1. Matt Holliday: Has he touched home yet? Might be soon. The 38-year-old Isotope needs to become the bench bat the Rockies didn’t trade for at the deadline.

2. Good Chris Rusin/Good Bryan Shaw: Don’t need both. One will do. A li’l lefty reliever help would do the Rockies a world of good.

3. Chad Bettis: His month-plus blister rehab is wrapped up, and Bettis gets the start Tuesday.

“We’re in a good spot, though. Really it’s ‘keep it going,’” Bettis said Monday. “We’re right where we want to be in the big scheme of things, right there in the hunt. To just step in and get going again, it’s going to be fun.”

The Rockies are in their best position to win the West in 20-plus years. Now they must close.