A game for the ages

 Nineteen pitchers. Six hundred nine pitches. Thirty-seven runners left on base.

Eighteen innings. Six hours and 39 minutes. Two-fifty in the morning.

Those were the numbers. That was the outline. This was the artist's rendering of one of the most amazing World Series games ever played, if not the most amazing.

In the end, it was Freddie Freeman -- last year's Series hero -- who ended it with a 406-foot walk-off bomb off Brendon Little, the ninth pitcher the Toronto Blue Jays sent to the hill. The Dodgers won 6-5 in, yes, 18 innings, and, yes, six hours, 39 minutes. First pitch was at 8:11 p.m. Monday; last pitch was at, yes, 2:50 a.m. Tuesday. 

People love to toss around words like "epic" these days, so much so that the word itself frequently gets all the tread worn off it. But this ... this was epic. It was a game for the ages that lasted for ages, to put it another way.

As Jeff Passan of ESPN wrote, it was the second-longest game, time-wise, in World Series history, to start with. It was only the second 18-inning game in Series history -- the last, Passan noted, was seven years ago and also ended in a Dodgers win on a walk-off homer. A little-used Dodgers reliever named Will Klein -- who? -- surrendered just one hit in four innings and struck out five. And Shohei Ohtani was ... well Shohei Ohtani.

Reached base a staggering nine times, something Passan noted had been done only once before in MLB history -- 83 years ago -- and never in the postseason. Hit two homers and two doubles. Drove in three of the Dodgers' six runs and scored three of them.

Remember Game 1, when giddy Blue Jays fans chanted "We don't need you!" at Ohtani in the ninth inning of an 11-4 Jays rout?

Well. Ohtani has gone 5-for-8 and scored four runs in the two games since, both L.A. victories. Four of his five hits have gone for extra bases. Perhaps those Blue Jays fans shouldn't have oughta done that.

And perhaps, with Ohtani scheduled to pitch Game 4, we should all get a jump on Sunday and set our clocks back a few days early. That way, if the Dodgers and Blue Jays again take us into the wee hours, they won't seem quite wee. 

Not that we wouldn't still be wide awake, spellbound in the way only the Fall Classic can spellbind us.