“On many Nov. 1sts to come, our contemporaries and descendants will be trading tales about this Game 7 in Toronto, a night of astonished stares and double-takes and wonderment over what’s next. The ones in Ontario will be obsessed, for a good while, about the many ways the Blue Jays could have won and the inside straights that allowed the Dodgers to.

Will Smith came up in the 11th inning with two out against Shane Bieber. There were two out, nobody on. Bieber tried to be careful, but when you’re careful against Smith and most of the Dodgers, you give up control of the ball-strike count. On 2-and-0 Bieber went to a slider that sat there and waited to become a passenger. Smith’s home run to left field gave the Dodgers a 5-4 lead, their first of the entire game, and eventually gave them their second consecutive World Series championship. No one had done that since the 1999-2000 Yankees, and no National League team had done it since the 1975-76 Big Red Machine from Cincinnati.”