I cannot remember the last time I was this excited about a five-minute window in sports. Last night’s regular-season finales between the Red Sox-Orioles and Yankees-Rays combined for what was simply just one of the best electrifying moments in recent sports history. If you were watching the ends to those games, with the importance that they held, you might be telling your grandkids about Sept. 28, 2010 one day. It was the day that the Red Sox completed one of the greatest September collapses ever.
Sure, it can be argued that a couple big comebacks in football or hockey were better “five-minute moments,†but hardly any happened in a real-time five minute window. Do you know how long it would take to score a TD, get back an onside kick and then score again in real-time? Figuring in commercial breaks and it could be up to 15 minutes.
But from the time that Baltimore shortstop Roberto Andino’s blooper to left fell in front of Carl Crawford, scoring the winning run to put the Red Sox on the ropes, and Evan Longoria’s home run that barely cleared the left-field wall in St. Petersburg, it was a mere four minutes.
In other words, I’m glad I didn’t decide to drive home from work before the Orioles-Sox game ended.
And who can’t wait for the first round of playoff baseball to start?