Last week, I wrote that Congress has been tying the hands of the Postal Service by limiting its ability to develop new products or to price its services competitively. Worse, Congress filled the Postal Service’s pockets with weights to drag them down financially, adding tens of billions in costs for retiree health insurance on a schedule no other corporation has to live with, while charging it more than $50 billion for pensions earned before the Postal Service was incorporated in 1971—costs that the federal government should bear, not the Postal Service.

It’s a recipe for killing the Postal Service, and postal management has sometimes seemed like a willing victim. Most notoriously, they’ve pushed to end six-day delivery of mail, even though customers love it.

But this weekend brought good news. Recognizing the strength their unparalleled, universal delivery system represents, postal management has negotiated something new: not subtracting, but adding a day of package delivery on Sunday. For now it’s limited to delivering packages for Amazon in New York and Los Angeles, but once these deliveries have been extended to the rest of the nation, who knows what other customers will decide to take advantage of this new opportunity?

I firmly believe that if the Postal Service is freed to compete more fairly, without having obstacles strewn in its path by a hostile Congress, it can rise to the challenge of maintaining universal delivery at a price that customers can afford. The Postal Service and its hundreds of thousands of employees deserve the chance.