PHOENIX -- Last fall, Curt Schilling sat at home with his wife, Shonda, and watched the New York Yankees take the New York Mets in the Subway World Series. What he was most interested in came in Game 2, when Roger Clemens overpowered the Mets in a 6-5 win.

Kicking back and watching the television set, Schilling was amazed at the fire Clemens still had at, then, 38. He kept coming back to Clemens' conditioning. To his desire. To his maniacal will to be the best.

Schilling looked at Shonda and told her, "That's what I want to be."

Curt Schilling gets a champagne shower after his co-MVP-winning performance in Game 7.(AP)

Two weeks from his 35th birthday, Schilling is on his way. In a scintillating Game 7 of the 2001 World Series, though Clemens outpitched him -- barely -- Schilling still positioned the Diamondbacks to win their first World Series. A stunning ninth-inning rally against Yankees closer Mariano Rivera delivered the Diamondbacks to the promised land -- 3-2, the scoreboard read -- and Schilling now has a feather to cap his finest season.

"That was his teacher," Shonda Schilling said amid the wild celebration in the Diamondbacks' clubhouse when asked about the conversation with her husband during last year's World Series. "He wanted to go out and learn from it.

"It's unbelievable that it came down to the two of them. I thought I was going to throw up."

She wasn't alone. Never before had Schilling pitched on short (three-days') rest, and yet, he did it for the second time in a week in Game 7 Sunday.

And he delivered a gem. He held the Yankees to just one hit through the first six innings, and that one was as harmless as a kitten. Paul O'Neill, the game's second batter, doubled into the right-center gap but then was thrown out attempting to stretch it into a triple.

After that, Schilling retired the next 16 Yankees in a row. Meanwhile, Danny Bautista's RBI double in the sixth gave Schilling a slight cushion, 1-0.

Still, there wasn't much margin for error.

"I felt great today," Schilling said. "I felt great all day.

"And knowing Randy (Johnson) was coming in out of the bullpen, I felt even better."

Schilling threw 88 pitches in Game 4 before leaving after the seventh inning with the score 1-1. The Diamondbacks scored two in the top of the eighth, but that was the first of closer Byung-Hyun Kim's two nightmares in the Bronx.

Sunday, Schilling lasted 7 1/3 innings, which was about three batters too long. Yankees rookie Alfonso Soriano walloped a homer on a low changeup to lead off the eighth and give New York a 2-1 lead, putting Schilling and the Diamondbacks in a precarious position.

In the end, though, it all worked out -- and Clemens found Schilling afterward to congratulate him and tell him how proud he was of the man he cornered in the Astrodome weight room in 1991 and delivered a long lecture about how good Schilling could be if only he worked at it.

Curt Schilling pitches for the third time in this World Series -- twice on three days' rest.(AP)

This week, as he has over the past few years, he worked.

Hard.

"This guy has never done it (pitched on short rest) before, and he does it twice in a week," Arizona manager Bob Brenly marveled. "I have the utmost respect for him."

Said Schilling: "Warming up, going into the game, I felt great. I felt great all the way through until I got the hook. The ball that Alfonso hit I didn't think was a bad pitch. I looked at it on the replay, and I shook off a fastball up and away. In my mind, I was two pitches away from going to that pitch and I felt like if I made a good split pitch right there and bounced it, I would get a swing and a miss.

"I don't know what to tell you. I was crushed when he hit it because I thought it was a good pitch. You know, going down 2-1 at that point in the ballgame with that bullpen, it's usually an antidote for winning. But we found a way."

It's been that kind of year for Schilling -- including in more important areas than between the lines. Shonda Schilling was diagnosed with melanoma this spring and was cured only after some serious treatment. One of their sons was taken to the emergency room with croup during the playoffs. Another son has been ill as well.

"It's been such a weird year for us," Shonda Schilling said.

Weirder still was the fact that much of their family wasn't at Game 7 on Sunday -- they were on a Disney cruise.

For an early Christmas present, Curt gave Shonda a cruise that included 20 family members -- Shonda's parents, her aunt and uncle, her brother and cousin, and Curt's aunt and uncle among them.

Problem was, they were to leave on Saturday, the day before Game 7. Curt arranged it all before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks pushed the postseason back a week. Game 7 of the World Series was supposed to have been played last Sunday, Oct. 28 -- not Nov. 4.

But the tickets weren't refundable, and ...

"They didn't want to go, but we made them go," Shonda Schilling said. "We told them they had to go."

The cruise ends Thursday. Shonda says she and Curt are going to try to meet everybody between now and then.

So yes, in the end, you know what's coming.

Curt Schilling, you just won the World Series.

Where are you going?

Yep, things have turned around already.