BIG PAPI FINISHED HIS SEASON with a curtain call — following a bunt single. In a (mostly) meaningless final game, it was something to cheer for. Jon Lester finished his season one win shy of 20. The Red Sox finished one win under 90. And, in what was possibly his final at-bat in a Red Sox uniform (the only major league uniform he's ever worn), Jason Varitek drove a ball that was destined for the bullpen, but caught on the warning track. This season, a lot of things came up just a little bit short.

Today, the standings show the Red Sox seven games out of first place in the American League East and six games out of the wild card, with zero games left to play. But back when there were still 130 games left to play, CHB was already on the ledge, just short of declaring the end of everything in early May. "I don’t want to panic or overreact," he wrote, "but is it possible the Red Sox season is already over?" This was the outlook even before Beckett, Matsuzaka, Buchholz, Martinez, Varitek, Pedroia, and Youklis all went down with one kind of injury or another, two of them the season-ending kind.

And, of course, Papi was done for, we all knew that. (Never mind that he was done for last season, as well.) This time it really was the end — it certainly sounded like it: "I miss the old days, too," he said. Yikes. No matter what time of year it is or where the team is in the standings, it's hard not to take a gloomy view of the season when your affable, heroic, universally beloved DH starts talking like this:

"Do you understand that this is killing me?" [Ortiz said]. "Do you know when I'm going good I cannot sleep because I'm trying to remember everything that I did right so I can repeat it the next day and the next? And that's when I'm going good. When I'm going bad, it's even worse because everybody looks to me to be the guy who comes through for this ballclub. It's like I never sleep anymore."

So, the 2010 Red Sox season was ending before the spring would. Not just ending, but scuffling, crashing, breaking its ribs (twice), breaking its foot (also twice), catching mono, and developing mystery infections. And then getting up off the dirt to play again. Because despite the mess, somehow there was still plenty of baseball worth watching, right through the summer and even into the first weeks of fall when playoff chances looked more like lottery odds. As the Boston Globe's Chad Finn said, "Can't think of a Sox team that missed the postseason that I'll remember as well as this one. Call it the D-Mac Effect."

Last year, there was the improbable rise of Nick Green. This year, half the line-up was filled with D-Macs. After being hastily added to the 40-man roster and following a memorable pinch-hitting debut, Darnell McDonald kept showing up to the park and playing major league baseball all season long, even after nearly being designated for assignment halfway through. Daniel Nava, a 27-year-old rookie, played 60 games for the team, hitting exactly one home run. And Bill Hall, a utility player who turned into a 96-game starter, seemed to be everywhere, including the pitching mound, playing every position except catcher and first base.

Hall was also part of one of the most exciting half-innings of the season, in which the Red Sox stole four bases off Mariano Rivera, and rallied to take the lead from the Yankees in the bottom of the 8th. Of course, the Sox went on to lose that pivotal game in the 10th, following their own blown save, because that's just the kind of season it was. Their record was 6-12 in extra innings, and they had 13 walk-off losses on the road — two statistics that add up to a lot of heartbreak and sleepy-eyed muttering. After 149 games, the team had used 133 different batting orders and 43 different starting outfield combinations – often filled with no-name journeymen, rookies, minor league call-ups, and banged up regulars.

In short, a great many things happened in this shortened season, and, as expected, none of it could be expected. That's why they call it baseball. Fifty years ago, Ted Williams hit the very last major league pitch he ever saw for a home run. Fifty years later, Daniel Nava hit the very first major league pitch he ever saw for a grand slam. The very last major league pitch to Mike Lowell was dinged high off the top of the Green Monster, just another long Fenway single. Varitek's last swing was just a loud out. And, Ortiz, he finished his season with a bunt.

But the once beleaguered big guy also ended up with 32 home runs and 102 RBI this season — and he's just three short of the all-time RBI record for a DH (currently held by Edgar Martinez). The informed baseball watcher will tell you that RBI is a meaningless statistic. That may be true, but so was the last game of the season: a surprise bunt single, a frivolous curtain call; a well-struck ball by the team's captain that might have made it out of the park, but didn't; and one more win. None of it really adds up to anything. But just like the statistically meaningless RBI, at least it was still fun to watch.

We'll get 'em next year.

ADDENDUM: Somehow I wrote an entire recap of the 2010 Red Sox season without mentioning how much fun Adrian Beltre was to have on the team.

First, a chart detailing the "Causes of Red Sox Injuries".

Second, one of my favorite Jerry Remy/Don Orsillo on-air exchanges, during a dustup with the Indians:

Orsillo: I tell you, one of the last people I'd throw at is Adrian Beltre.

Remy: The human destroyer.

WHAT'S THIS NOW, it's spring again? Whatever happened to the winter? Not to mention the fall? Let's forget about all that nonsense, and think back on happier times while we wait for a new season to begin.

The good eggs at YFSF.org have set their happy thoughts on October in March — a compilation of the most significant postseason plays ranked by their WPA, or the potential effect the play had on the outcome of the game. The result is a strange combination of analytical and emotional gooeyness that at once fills you with an appreciation for the role of stats in modern day baseball-ing and pure, old-fashioned reverie.

Ranked this way, Game 5 of the 1999 ALDS versus the Indians bubbles up as one of the top three most dramatic games in Red Sox postseason history. Watching the game on iTunes 10 years later, the lineup looks familiar, but any postseason game before 2004 still seems a parallel universe away. Certain scenes stick out as particularly odd/amusing: Pedro throwing to Tek, but with Manny at the plate. Manny sharing the outfield with Dave Roberts, who catches a towering fly off the bat of Trot Nixon. Plus, appearances by good ol' Lou Merloni, Nomar in his prime (intentionally walked twice), and the Derek Lowe Face. The game itself is dramatic and fun; the intervening events since 1999 and the overlapping, wacky "what we know now" quality make it even more enjoyable to watch today.

Regarding events closer to the present, Sox first base coach Ron Johnson got to experience his own personal happy moment during spring training, in the form of an on-field reunion with his son. From the Sox-Astros game update on Boston.com:

Pre-game: The exchange of lineup cards had an interesting twist with Sox first base coach Ron Johnson (coaching third in today's split-squad game) exchanging lineups with son Chris, who will play third base for the Astros today. Umpires seemed to get a big kick out of it.

Seems like simple, father-son baseball fun. But the next day's follow-up by Nick Carfado hints at something a little deeper:

Johnson has been a baseball lifer, which means being away from your family. He probably missed most of Chris’s Little League and high school games. But yesterday he watched him as a major leaguer.

"I’ve been around the game for a long time," said Johnson, "and I’ve seen everything and been around a lot of players, but I almost can’t explain it. It was a strange feeling.

"There were just a lot of things that kept sinking in during the course of the game. I know he’s been doing well, but I’m a developer and an evaluator for the last 20 years, and all of a sudden now I see my son on the major league field.

"I know he came up last year in September, but to see him with my own eyes . . . and I’m in the third base coach’s box . . . and there’s Terry Francona and Brad Mills and Roy Oswalt, Jason Varitek, and Jon Lester is on the mound . . .

"Obviously you’re looking at a guy on the other team who you have emotional ties to, and you realize that he moves around and he looks like he can play here. It was exciting. It was really very exciting."

Baseball's timelessness can also turn into a form of time travel: today's games mingling with the memories of games past. There are always the same nine positions on the field – but it's a little bit strange when you look back and one of them is played by a shortstop whose greatness you'd forgotten or when you look up and third base is occupied by your very own son. It's baseball's ability to keep telling stories across years and generations that lets us appreciate and experience the past and the present in new ways.

But enough of yesterday's happy thoughts. As Cleveland Indians manager Lou Boudreau once said, "On Opening Day, the world is all future and no past." Right now, every team's got a .500 record, and it's anybody's guess what happens next.

Happy Opening Day.

NOMAR GARCIAPARRA RETIRES as a Red Sox.