The Toronto Blue Jays’ Ben Revere sprays fans with champagne as they celebrate the team’s win over the Texas Rangers to take the American League Division Series at Rogers Centre on Wednesday.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Well, that was amazing. All those years of being a fan, and you think you've seen it all.
But nothing like this. Because how could there be anything like this – a game that was almost decided in the worst possible way by a grievous umpire's call on a catcher's throw to the mound. A game that seemed bound to be remembered in the worst possible way for crowd-deflating replays, managerial jawing and beer cans tossed onto the field by angry idiot fans.
And then was won by Jose Bautista's three-run, do-or-die home run that was made possible by three consecutive, life-preserving Texas errors. The baseball gods are indeed crazy, but they still have a gift for the perfect dramatic arc.
The look on Mr. Bautista's face after crushing the pitch from reliever Sam Dyson said it all – or what fraction of all could be caught in a proud, vengeful stare toward the unfairly advantaged opposition.
People were suddenly jumping up and down with completely uninhibited joy – and those were just the players in the Blue Jays dugout, those cool, detached guns-for-hire who channelled their inner and outer fan even more zealously than the 50,000 bystanders who paid to have their emotions toyed with at the most extreme levels of the sport.
It felt like a walk-off home run, for all the noise and the cathartic release of craziness in its ideal form, without the added beer cans. But it was still only the seventh inning.
This was a game that had everything, and often made you realize you didn't necessarily want to see a game that had everything. Rob Ford, a born attention grabber sitting in the front row behind home plate, became the definition of an afterthought. Marcus Stroman, the anointed Game 5 saviour, came and went quietly in some prior, earlier version of the match, back when it looked sure to be a grim Rogers Centre fizzling out like the first two games of this strange series.
Moments of brilliance that would have astonished baseball connoisseurs in the gentler regular season lost their usual ecstasy – because we needed so much more in this taut, death march of a game. Forget about Edwin Encarnacion's majestic home run to tie the score and rescue our deadened hopes – because that was before Shin-Soo Choo found a novel way to untie the 2-2 game by sticking his red-gloved hand in front of catcher Russell Martin's toss back to the mound, allowing Rougned Odor to dash home on the deflection.
The win only felt preordained after the fact, once Mr. Bautista had done his best to craft the needed turnaround. By the end, which was all too slow in coming, we all knew the good side of what it felt like to have your hearts and hopes turned upside down. The sheer surprise of defeat reshaped into victory – with the delicious pleasure prolonged by the composed invincibility of 20-year-old closer Roberto Osuna – displaced all of the despair and injustice that had dominated our vulnerable emotions for much of the game.
Back then – impossible to believe now – it was inning after inning of growing worry and painful apathy. How were we going to cope with loss, or justify the quiet destruction of the Blue Jays' noisy inevitability? The playoffs are a crapshoot, the experts love to tell you. But you only hear that when you lose and it's no consolation.
Was this win a crapshoot? Are you kidding? It was beautiful, brilliant, willed out of a loss by players, such as Mr. Bautista, who make people hang on to a ball game like it's the most powerful drama in the world.
On this day, and this night, of the unexpected and the never-seen, the theatre was thrilling – not least because as a fully committed fan, you feel like you're on stage for every pitch.
And the players return the favour. After Mr. Bautista's home run, Mr. Encarnacion turned to the fans with an arms-wide gesture of exaltation, almost provoking the Texas Rangers into a brawl. For a while, there was so much reciprocal emotion between players and fans that you suddenly wondered if we could still forfeit our way out of these wonderful moments.
After the game, the young Jays danced around the artificial diamond like the kids they may well be. They gave each other piggyback rides, glad-handed their way along the baseline stands and sprayed us fans with the victor's champagne that we surely deserved as much as they did.