Why we watch

Quietly, the World Series began out in Los Angeles last night, and be honest, you almost forgot about it, didn't you? There was a high school football game to go to or a handful of college football games on the tube -- hey, look, Yale trounced Penn -- and of course a pile of NBA and NHL games.

(Although why the latter two mattered considering their seasons go on for entire epochs of the human experience is a mystery. But that's just me.)

Anyway, the Series began and even ESPN didn't seem to care much, considering the top entries on its website for much of the night were NBA games. 

However, then came the bottom of the 10th.

The home team was trailing, 3-2, as it had much of the night. But then, miraculously, the bases filled up with Dodger blue, and to the plate came 35-year-old Freddie Freeman, who'd earlier tripled and died at third with his only hit of the night.

One pitch from Nestor Cortes, one swing of Freeman's bat, and it was over.

In that one swing the baseball was a white dot against the night sky, streaking out toward the left-center. It landed in a sea of leaping, waving, howling humans, and Freeman briefly held his bat aloft as he started his home-run trot, hobbling on a sprained ankle, slapping palms with the first-base coach, still holding high the hand that had held the bat.

Walk-off grand slam, and a 6-3 victory. Walk-off grand slam, and it was 1988 again and Kirk Gibson was hobbling around the bases after his iconic walk-off homer, and somewhere in the celestial expanse Fernando and Tommy Lasorda and Carl Erskine and, oh, heck, all the old Bums were raising a ruckus.

And the rest of us?

We got another reminder that there is no drama like World Series drama.

Maybe you can replicate it in basketball or football or hockey, but baseball goes back further, and it calls up memories that are as elemental to our shared experience as dirt and grass. Freeman walks it off with a grand slam, and here again is Gibson in '88 and Joe Carter in '93 and Bill Mazeroski in '61, and of course the Babe with his called-shot-or-not in '32.

Freeman joins that lineage now. Afterward he said it was something you dream about as a kid, and every former kid who grew up in a time before pro football and basketball  swallowed America's attention span knew exactly what he was talking about.

It's why we still watch every October. Or at least should.