Like Mike Myers, Terry Adams has had his problems, but, like Myers, he comes in with two down and gets his man, then settles in for two scoreless innings of work (one, I must say, belongs to Tek, who throws out two runners in the fifth).

Scot Shields is their crummy middle reliever. We beat him like a rock, Millar sealing the win with a three-run Coke-bottle shot. And to cap it, after Johnny catches the last out on the warning track directly beneath us, he throws the ball up to me. The game’s on ESPN, and when we get home I’ve got e-mails from people who saw it. There I was, filling the screen, pointing and hollering thank-you, letting Johnny know—once more—that he is still The Man.

September 2nd

Improbable or not, the Sox Express keeps rolling along—this makes nine in a row and we are rapidly leaving the land of the unusual and entering that of the out-and-out, please-pass-the-happy-gas unreal. No question tonight’s game is the toughest of the lot, with Bartolo Colon throwing in the mid-nineties and the Angels offense struggling hard to salvage at least one game of the three. It is important that they do, of course, because of “the swing” that comes into play when the clubs in first and second play each other;[46] there’s a hell of a big difference between leaving Fenway two and a half games out and leaving it four and a half out. The Halos end up leaving it four and a half out mostly because baseball is also a game of luck and Boston’s still running. It would have to be, wouldn’t you say, for the Sox to go 2 for 14 with runners in scoring position…and still manage to eke out the win?

The tragickal Mr. Lowe, who has been snakebit most of the year (there have been innings when he’s been forced to get not just four outs but sometimes even six), only has to endure a couple of miscues tonight, and Adam Kennedy is the beneficiary of both. One is an error by right fielder Dave Roberts; the other is a triple that center fielder Johnny Damon should have caught, and in neither case does the speedy Kennedy end up scoring.

Lowe settles down after giving up single runs in each of the first three. The Red Sox are only able to touch up Colon for four, also in the first three (tonight the Angel bullpen is superb), but four is enough. Between the first of April and the end of July the Red Sox made losing one-run games an art, but now they have turned that around. By the time Keith Foulke faces the last Anaheim batter of the series, thirty-five thousand or so of the Fenway Faithful—Stewart O’Nan and myself among them—are on their feet, screaming, “SWEEP! SWEEP! SWEEP!”