Long, winding ALCS road leads to familiar destination
NEW YORK -- Whaddaya mean Game 7 here on Wednesday night?
After Boston was down three games to none? Forced during a Game 6 started by Curt Schilling, who was supposed to be finished for the season and headed for the surgeon's scalpel to have the dislocated tendon in his ankle repaired?
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| 'This is why everybody was wanting Boston and New York,' says Manny Ramirez, right.(Getty Images) |
Guaranteed when a frazzled umpiring crew in the midst of a hard day's night actually reversed two calls that went in Boston's favor? Right here in the Bronx?
Boston 4, New York 2, and come back for Game 7 right here on Wednesday night.
If you dare.
"Oh my God, it's unbelievable," Boston slugger Manny Ramirez said. "We live for this, man. This is why everybody was wanting Boston and New York. I think if we play Minnesota, it wouldn't have been so exciting."
Never before has a team in any baseball postseason lost the first three games of a best-of-7 series and come back to force a Game 7, let alone actually win one of these series.
The Yankees have not lost a Game 7 in Yankee Stadium since the 1957 World Series, when the Milwaukee Braves dumped them in a thriller in which Lew Burdette won Games 2, 5 and 7 -- and pitched Game 7 on two days' rest.
"They deserved to beat us," Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter said after Game 6. "They played better than us the last three games. Come back here tomorrow night."
You know how sometimes you're on your way somewhere and you get seriously lost? And you forgot a map and you're too harried to stop and ask for directions and you think you'll never get there? Then you round a corner and, suddenly, inexplicably, you're there?
That's what this series is like. New York wins the first three games and threatens Boston with utter humiliation. Then the Red Sox reel off a three-game winning streak to even the series and threaten New York with equal or greater embarrassment.
