Every fan of major league baseball should have the opportunity to see his or her favorite player give a post-game interview covered in champagne. These rowdy, raucous locker room celebrations punctuate the end of an arduous baseball journey whether the bottles are popped after clinching a division or hoisting the world series trophy.

The Oakland Athletics found themselves attending such a party Monday night after defeating the rival Texas Rangers 4-3, inciting chaos at the relatively crowded O.Co Coliseum, a baseball venue usually plagued by some of the worst attendance in American professional sports. Fans were on hand to see the Green and Gold secure a spot in the new one-game wild card playoff.

After the game, A’s breakout star Josh Reddick tried to describe the feeling of sending Oakland to its first postseason appearance since 2006.

“Man, it’s tough to explain,” he told the San Jose Mercury-News after the game. “It’s like winning a championship right there. I don’t know what else to say.”

Certainly, a team many picked to lose 100 games in 2012 should be proud of clinching a wild card spot in the last week of the season. Many writers and fans have grown accustomed to talking about the A’s as an afterthought in Bay Area baseball to the star-studded Giants.

But for all the pomp and circumstance following Monday’s game, the A’s haven’t reached the end of their journey. The American League West is still up for grabs, and if the A’s win the last two games against the Rangers they can take the real prize, which is an automatic entrance into the divisional round of playoffs.

While the brand new wild card game has made the regular season more interesting by doubling the number of wild card teams from each league, the fact is the single-game playoff, like any other single Major League game, is almost totally unpredictable.

In a seven-game series, the A’s would be able to let their biggest strength, their deep starting rotation, shine to its fullest. Were they to face the Yankees in a single game, though, that advantage would be nullified as they would likely face star hurler C.C. Sabathia or playoff veteran Andy Pettitte, who holds the all-time postseason records for wins (19) and innings pitched (263).

So while the A’s have certainly accomplished something special by proving themselves worthy of playing October baseball, they shouldn’t have been so quick to get the party going when there’s still so much at stake over the next two days. After cutting loose and knocking back the bubbly already, it will be that much harder for Oakland to come out tonight for game two and play like everything is still on the line, which it is.