Culture

ks as an usher and he got us better seats in left field, about a dozen rows back.  Those seats were good enough to catapult us into the moment, not just metaphorically, but also literally: when J.J. Harding hit a two run shot to put the Orioles up 2-1, the ball tipped off the hands of the guy in front of us and then skipped behind us. If you watch the highlight, you can see Brad falling over and spilling my beer amid the flurry; I’m in the blue shirt, white hat, beard. But not catching the home run was the only thing that went wrong, so let me tell you about this magical night. The press has already trumpeted Wednesday as one of the greatest nights of regular season baseball ever, and rightly so.  They’ve covered every detail of Tampa Bay’s historic September comeback (one noted statistician put the odds it at 278,000,000:1) and Boston’s unprecedented month-long collapse, all of which culminated with two unbelievable games of epic proportion. But to be there, on the ground, and watch one of those games unfold in person was something else altogether.