You might be tempted, if you're a Charlotte Bobcats fan, to lock the door on the bandwagon today.

After all, you've likely spent the past six or so years enduring the indifference, the smirks, the flat-out frowns of family and friends at the suggestion they might start following our city's "other" major professional sports franchise.

"I was told I was supporting a loser," says Frederick Tulay, a fan since the Bobcats played their first NBA game in 2004.

This week, however, an unsurprisingly growing number of fans is celebrating the franchise's first NBA playoff appearance, which the Bobcats clinched Wednesday with a victory over the New Orleans Hornets. And the long-termers? They're happy to welcome the people they've been trying to recruit all along.

"I don't think there will be tons of people saying, 'Where were you?'" says Huntersville's John Pettice, who runs one of the team's most popular online fan sites, Bobcats Planet .

Pettice and others have seen signs of increased interest in the team - from workplace conversations to games being shown more frequently on tavern televisions.

Mark Packer, host of a popular afternoon sports talk show on WFNZ-AM, uses listener e-mails as a barometer, and messages about the Bobcats have doubled in the past two to three weeks. "I'm sure it will continue to gain momentum now that they have clinched a playoff bid," he says.

Pettice, who also has noticed an increase in traffic on his site, thinks other factors are at play - most prominently, ownership.

"Michael Jordan now owns the team," he says. "For right or wrong, there are a lot of people that simply can't stand Bob Johnson."

Pettice also sees a convergence of sorts - the Panthers having a down season mixed with young fans and newcomers to the area who don't have lingering bad feelings about the 2003 breakup with the city's first NBA franchise, the Hornets.

But winning, of course, is the best kindling.

"The thing about Charlotte is it's such a bandwagon town," Pettice says. "As soon as the Panthers had that one good season, it was like night and day. I would be shocked if people didn't jump on (the Bobcats bandwagon) now."

And if that sounds a bit critical, well, Bobcats fans should be allowed some early-adopter righteousness. They've faced dismissiveness about their team and NBA basketball, along with angry residue about the fight surrounding the public funding of the uptown arena.

"The first couple of years, I was an outcast - even with my friends," says Evan Plante, who sometimes rode his bike alone to games from his home in Charlotte's NoDa neighborhood. Now, he says, more friends are interested in joining him in the $10 seats. He's glad to welcome them - perhaps even if those cheap seats and bike rack spaces become scarcer. "It's nice to feel like a part of a sports community again," he says.

That growing group would include Matt Kinney, who moved to Charlotte in 1989 and remembers some of the best days of the Hornets. His father took him to his first Hornets game, but they didn't have tickets and couldn't find a reasonably scalped seat until near halftime.

"It didn't matter," Kinney remembers in an e-mail. "We just wanted in there to be a part of it."

But when the Hornets left town, Kinney's passion for the NBA left with them. He swore the Bobcats would never get a dime from him, and that held true until he went to a game this season. Then owner Bob Johnson left, and the team kept winning. Now, Kinney has purchased season tickets for next year.

"Go, Bobcats," he writes. "I still can't believe I'm saying that."

Welcome, say the fans he's joining. (And: It's about time.)

"I've been waiting," says Pettice, "to see when this was going to happen."