It’s more than just a win; it’s a statement. By winning tonight, we broke the record for consecutive playoff wins, with eight straight. Another stat that every commentator unpacks is that we’re one of only four championship teams to have never trailed in the Series.[89] Thanks to Johnny, O.C., Manny and Papi, we scored in the first inning of every game, and our starters, with the exception of Wake, shut down St. Louis’s big sticks. Schill, Petey and D-Lowe combined for 20 shutout innings. Much respect to pitching coach Dave Wallace and his scouts for coming up with a game plan to stop the Cards. As a team, they batted .190, well below the Mendoza Line. Scott Rolen and Jim Edmonds went 1 for 30, that one hit being a gimme bunt single by Edmonds against a shifted infield. Albert Pujols had zero RBIs. Reggie Sanders went 0 for 9. It’s not that we crushed the ball. We scored only four runs in Game 3 and three in Game 4. Essentially, after the Game 1 slugfest, we played NL ball, beating them with pitching, and in the last two games our defense was flawless. In finally putting the supposed Curse to rest, we dotted every i and crossed every t. And to make it all even sweeter, the last out was made by Edgar Renteria, who wears—as a couple of folks noted—the Babe’s famous #3.

October 28th

It came down to this: with two outs in the St. Louis half of the ninth and Keith Foulke on the mound—Foulke, the nearly sublime Red Sox closer this postseason—only Edgar Renteria stood between Boston and the end of its World Series drought. Renteria hit a comebacker to the mound. “Stabbed by Foulke!” crowed longtime Red Sox radio announcer Joe Castiglione. “He underhands to first! The Red Sox are World Champions! Can you believe it?”

I hardly could, and I wasn’t the only one. A hundred miles away, my son woke up his five-year-old son to see the end. When it was over and the RedSox were mobbing each other on the infield, Ethan asked his father, “Is this a dream or are we living real life?”

The answer, it seems to me this morning, is both. The only newspaper available at the general store was the local one (the others were held up because of the lateness of the game), and the Sun-Journal’s huge front-page headline, of a size usually reserved only for the outbreak of war or the sudden death of a president, was only two words and an exclamation mark:

AT LAST!

When the other New England papers finally do arrive in my sleepy little pocket of New England, I’m confident they will bear similar happy headlines of a similar size on their front pages.