NINE INNINGS AND THREE DAYS LATER, there's revelry on the streets of Philadelphia:

All around the city and suburbs, fireworks exploded, horns honked and pots and pans banged as if it were New Year's Eve. . . . In Northeast Philadelphia, thousands more gathered at the intersection of Frankford and Cottman Avenues, where city workers had greased the light poles to keep fans from dangerous, inebriated ascents.

There's a city that really knows its fans.

A SWING AND A MISS on ball four turns into a strike 'em out-throw 'em out double play. A take-out slide into second base would have done more good as a regular slide. A check-swing third strike ends the inning with bases loaded. And nearly every player was served at least one fat pitch which escaped unharmed. After all the missed opportunities, time eventually runs out on you. Ms. Benjamin handles the post-mortem for the Globe, and YFSF looks back on a good ride.

ASHES OF TIME (REDUX) is a weird bird, even for Wong Kar Wai. Veering from silly and melodramatic to simple and affecting – almost moment to moment and shot to shot – the movie has over-stylized camera work, preposterous sword-fighting, stirring heroics, over-the-top emotion, specious logic, a scene with a girl getting all sensual with her horse and many more scenes of a different girl standing around with a very sad donkey. Eventually the impulse to guffaw is overcome by the desire to weep, and the movie builds toward an unlikely and surprisingly emotional ending. As the review in the Village Voice puts it:

Wong has a bit of a wink with all of the deadpan death threats and grand allusions — women rake their cheeks along tree bark, limestone, and a horse's neck in fits of longing — before turning mannerism into the very stuff of transcendence, as with Maggie Cheung's penultimate lament. It's a knowing end-run around cliché that seeks to assert the damnable truth of cliché itself. In a move that would become his trademark, Wong rejects the happy ending for the almost ecstatically sad, making your heart soar even as he tells you, essentially, that it's impossible, all of it — that it'll never work.

SURELY, ALL OF THIS EXTRA BASEBALL IS GRAVY, as YFSF puts it. Nevertheless, hopes are high for a final game 7 (which should have been a final game 5), because we've been here before and it usually works out pretty well. But before we lose ourselves too much in anticipation, let's also remember where we came from, and how good it's been since:

It was on the bus the other day, heading from Fenway Park to the airport after their miraculous Game 5 win, that Kevin Youkilis reflected on all that he's been a part of - three comebacks from the depths of elimination - to Varitek, sitting next to him.

"I said, 'We're so spoiled,' " Youkilis said. "It's amazing. It's really amazing the games we play, and how much fun it's been. When we're all old and our children are all grown up, we'll sit around and meet up and talk about games like the game the other day. It's a wild ride, and we're very spoiled."

THE BEST BASEBALL STATISTICS CHART EVER tracks the win probability during the best elimination-game comeback ever. Sure, it seems like the cold, calculated view of a Sabermetrics-loving number cruncher. But when you look at it another way, it's an emotional barometer, as well – illustrating precisely how we felt at each point in the game, from sofa-slumping despair to furtive hopefulness and, finally, the bewildering heights of improbable, undeserved joy.

BEFORE GAME 5 OF THE 2008 ALCS BECAME A MAGIC ACT, while the Rays were still doing the pummeling and the Red Sox were the only ones at Fenway who didn't know the season was over, I averted my eyes from the grim disaster unfolding on TV by reading Bill Simmons thoughts on the season's other great loss:

I still miss Manny. I can't lie. It took me four solid weeks to accept that he was really gone. Three weeks after the trade happened, I flicked on NESN for the opening pitch of a Sox game, noticed the SkyDome and thought, "Yes, Manny loves hitting in the SkyDome!" A second passed. A lightbulb went on. My shoulders slumped. Manny was gone.

All 9,000 words of his story are worth reading (and he even includes one of my favorite Manny anecdotes in a footnote), but here I'll skip to the end:

So, how will this play out? I see Manny leading the Dodgers to the 2008 World Series, breaking their hearts and donning pinstripes next season. He won't feel bad, because he's Manny. The L.A. fans will feel bad. I will feel worse. It will be the single most painful sports transaction of my lifetime. It will make me question why I follow sports at all, why we spend so much time caring about people who don't care about us. I don't want to hear Manny booed at Fenway. I don't want to root against him. I don't want to hold a grudge. I don't want to hear the "Mah-knee! Mah-knee!" chant echoing through the new Stadium. I am not ready for any of it. You love sports most when you're 16, then you love it a little bit less every year. And it happens because of things like this. Like Manny breaking the hearts of everyone in Boston because his agent wanted to get paid, then Manny landing in New York because the Yanks offered the most money.

PHILADELPHIA IS AN EVEN MORE UNFORGIVING baseball town than Boston? I guess, take it from one who knows. Terry Francona managed the Phillies from 1997–2000, with a 285-363 record:

So he was "genuinely happy" to see [the Phillies] experience success of their own. He may not have shared that sentiment for a city that didn't show him a lot of love. In explaining the differences between the fans in the two cities, Francona said, "I think there's more love for their players here. They want [them] to do good so bad that when they don't, it just kills them. In Philadelphia, it turned to hatred in a hurry. Like ball one."

"FENWAY PARK, IN BOSTON, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark." The magic of tilt shift photography (click link above) brings to mind John Updike's description of Fenway in his farewell to Ted Williams, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu":

Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man's Euclidean determinations and Nature's beguiling irregularities. Its right field is one of the deepest in the American League, while its left field is the shortest; the high left-field wall, three hundred and fifteen feet from home plate along the foul line, virtually thrusts its surface at right-handed hitters. On the afternoon of Wednesday, September 28th, as I took a seat behind third base, a uniformed groundkeeper was treading the top of this wall, picking batting-practice home runs out of the screen, like a mushroom gatherer seen in Wordsworthian perspective on the verge of a cliff. The day was overcast, chill, and uninspirational. The Boston team was the worst in twenty-seven seasons. A jangling medley of incompetent youth and aging competence, the Red Sox were finishing in seventh place only because the Kansas City Athletics had locked them out of the cellar. They were scheduled to play the Baltimore Orioles, a much nimbler blend of May and December, who had been dumped from pennant contention a week before by the insatiable Yankees. I, and 10,453 others, had shown up primarily because this was the Red Sox's last home game of the season, and therefore the last time in all eternity that their regular left fielder, known to the headlines as TED, KID, SPLINTER, THUMPER, TW, and, most cloyingly, MISTER WONDERFUL, would play in Boston. . . .

WE'VE BEEN HERE BEFORE, and it always feels this horrible. Amalie Benjamin (the shining jewel of the Boston Globe sports section, by the way) assesses the situation:

They have been in this spot before. A tight spot, and an unforgiving one. The Red Sox have been down and have made it out, as recently as last year's American League Championship Series, when they yielded three of the first four games to the Indians, and in the 2004 ALCS, when they lost the first three games to the Yankees. At those points, it did not seem as if the Sox were on the brink of a comeback.

Nor does it seem that way today.

In other words, every time this happens, it feels completely and utterly hopeless.

So that should be comforting, right? Right?

TITO GETS HIGH PRAISE from the media, if not from the fans. First, there's this column on ESPN.com, and then there's this defense by Bill Simmons in his mailbag:

Q: How many more times are we going to be subjected to Tito Francona's bonehead decisions? He is great at managing players' egos and building relationships with them, but please get him a coach to do the X's and O's before he kills us. We can't keep overcoming his major screwups, can we? I've said it since 2004 and it is still true … just amazing we keep winning despite him. I set the over/under of his ALCS miscues at four!

- Randy, Derry, N.H.

SG: You can read more of Randy's work at his "Mr. Ungrateful" blog. Here's my take on Tito: He has never been outmanaged in a playoff series; his players love him and play hard for him; he handles the media as deftly as anyone this side of Doc Rivers; and by all accounts, he's a genuinely good person. You're never going to find a perfect manager or coach. That person just doesn't exist. So if you had your druthers (love that word), you'd want your manager's biggest weakness to be, "makes some occasionally boneheaded decisions that rarely come back to haunt the team because of the horseshoe that was surgically inserted into his rear end during the '04 playoffs." He's certainly the best Red Sox manager of my lifetime. And beyond that, nobody spits sunflower seeds with more grace and precision.

Meanwhile, Tony Massarotti profiles Terry Francona and offers this fun little tidbit to illustrate why he may have the toughest job in baseball:

How in god's name can you justify that??? You are being paid millions of dollars and even my 9 year old son can do a better job than [a] sleep on the wheel manager like you.

- E-mail sent to Francona from Chembur, Mumbai (India)