The Giants were 12 outs from winning the World Series with a 4-0 lead and Russ Ortiz in complete and utter command of the Angels, and as he stood in left field playing catch with Kenny Lofton between halves of the sixth inning, Barry Bonds motioned to the ESPN set above the bullpens and the bleachers in left field. He was grinning broadly, and when he got the attention, he waved his finger in told-you-so fashion, then turned to point to the right-field stands.

Message delivered.

After Game 2, when Bonds faced Francisco Rodriguez for the first time, I had said on SportsCenter that Rodriguez presented a unique problem the first time a left-handed batter faced him because of the way his fastball cuts in on the hitter's hands, and thus Bonds grounded out. The next day, when he came out of the clubhouse at Pac Bell Park, Bonds begged to differ. "You were wrong," he said. "It didn't cut much. I hit it hard, I just didn't get it in the air, the way I should have."

He laughed. "I'm monitoring to make sure you're right," he said. "If he throws me another fastball, I'll hit it farther than the one I hit off Percival."

At that moment in Game 6, as he played catch with Lofton, that's precisely what Barry Bonds had done. The next fastball Rodriguez threw Bonds was in the top of the sixth inning of the sixth game, and Barry deposited it down a runway in right field, an estimated 485 feet away. Being the ombudsman that he is, he was reminding me.

At that moment, he seemed consumed with joy, and producer Gus Ramsey said that he had never seen Barry so happy. Before the inning began, Bonds pointed again, this time to the scoreboard, then closed his fist in a mini-pump. Barry's finest moment was 12 outs away, with dominant starting pitching and the best bullpen in baseball in the second half of the season, and unlike those moments hitting 73 homers or passing Frank Robinson or whatever other individual milestone he achieved, he clearly understood he was about to experience the winning of the World Series.

He had talked about it during the week. "Tom Brady was complaining about all the appearances and the media," Bonds said one day. "I told him, 'Dude, keep doing all these appearances, you'll go 8-8 and the media won't care, because in the end, it all comes back to winning."

What seemed to be, in Merry Clayton's words, a shot away, slipped away. The next afternoon Bonds said, "I can't believe how fast the Angels got those runs, how quickly we were behind. It seemed like a couple of pitches. You have to respect them. They are good. They are very good."

Standing on the set behind him, one could see Bonds' shoulders droop after Troy Glaus smoked the ball up the alley off Robb Nen. Barry Bonds could joke about the home run. He laughed about all the intentional walks ("Do you know how boring it is to go six hours from batting practice until the eighth inning without taking one swing?"), he compared the various angles of Rodriguez's release point on his breaking ball to Juan Marichal's angles, and he'd even admitted that "once I got past that Atlanta chop that had been dogging me for 10 years this all was about having fun." But when he got that close to winning the World Series and saw it slip away, it wasn't funny.

When the Series ended, the focus wasn't on the fact that he dominated this Series more than any offensive player has ever dominated a seven-game series or an entire postseason, or how often his walking altered games, or how after all those years of frustrations his career postseason OPS is now .935. (For perspective, Willie Mays' regular-season career OPS was .941). No, the focus was what he did or did not say in the second, third and fourth round of questions. The first round, which we got to watch on the set as it was being fed up onto the satellite, included polite answers that included, "We have to tip our hats to them, because they really played well;" "They earned a lot of respect;" and "I admire a team that plays as hard as they do." In the subsequent rounds, it deteriorated, which gave some people something to obsess on rather than the Angels or Bonds' performance.

Barry does not react well to being cornered, he does not take well to being asked "how do you feel about losing" for the 14th time. When the Orioles lost to the Indians in the playoffs in 1997, Cal Ripken refused to come out and meet the media, and was heard only when the two-hour limit was up to yell out, "Get the media out of here." He's a saint. Joe DiMaggio never dealt with the press on this basis, nor did Ted Williams, because there were never 500-800 media members at a regular-season Red Sox game.

The media horde covering the World Series in the '70s was negligible, so when Mays came into the visitors' dugout the day before Game 1 of the '73 Series -- his return to the Bay Area -- few cared that to the question "How do you feel about being back?" he responded, "I just wish the thing were over." My lord, we even had someone quote Jeff Kent about Bonds being separate, which is the height of cluelessness.

Once Bonds got past the Braves, when it came to the time in uniform, on the field, some days he talked about broader issues. "I really don't want Henry Aaron's record," Bonds said. "He should have that. To do it in the era that he did it? That's incredible. It's hard to think about taking that away, because I know what it means. No (laugh). I don't want Aaron, but I am coming to bring down Ruth (laugh again)."

Some days, he talked hitting, which is like being able to discuss the fugue with Johan Sebastian Bach or journalism with David Halberstam. He discussed keeping the ball fair: "I have drills in the cage each day to prepare myself, but at this point in my career I don't get into streaks where I hook balls foul, although sometimes against 89-91 mph guys who want to run the ball in it's good to take a pitch way in I couldn't get fair and hit it as far as I can foul just to see how he reacts with his next pitch." He talked about keeping one's focus, such as when the Dodgers threw him 18 straight balls over two games, then when Jesse Orosco threw the first strike -- a 2-0 slider down and away -- he drove it into the left-field bleachers. And he talked about why he doesn't let Pac Bell's winds bother him; there have been only six balls in three years hit into McCovey Cove not hit by Barry.

One day he talked about his offseason conditioning at Stanford, with the likes of Gary Sheffield and Jerry Rice, and how intolerant he is of those who choose not to do a 6-8 hour workout every day in the offseason. "It comes with the responsibility and ambition for greatness," he said. "The price isn't in talking or doing what people in your business want me to do, it's doing what this game demands I do if I want to be what I want to be."

There were, of course, many stories to this World Series. Darin Erstad proved what Mike Scioscia meant when he said, "This guy has as much big-game drive and passion and ability as anyone I've ever known." The coaches will tell you that when Scioscia in spring training asked the players to be selfless and aggressive and play the game of productive outs, it worked because Erstad immediately bought into it and Erstad is the leader of that team. "When your star player cares only about winning," says Scioscia, "it makes managing a whole lot easier." And when it comes to stars, Garrett Anderson is a human metronome, while Troy Glaus is on the verge of being a 50-60 home run infielder.

If Bay Area folks second-guessed Dusty Baker's use of Livan Hernandez and Kirk Rueter, people across baseball marveled at the way Scioscia and Bud Black had no fear about making two rookies named John Lackey and Francisco Rodriguez two of their four most important pitchers.

There were larger issues. The fall of the Yankees and Braves indicated that while their veteran pitchers are still very good, they have begun to age into mortality, and once Curt Schilling and Randy Johnson were out of the tournament, it became a hitters' postseason, not a pitchers' postseason. As Roger Clemens hits 40 and Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux, Kevin Brown and others approach that age, other than the Diamondbacks and Pedro Martinez, the next generation is maturing -- the Oakland Three, Roy Oswalt and Wade Miller, Matt Morris, Roy Halladay, Mark Buehrle, Bartolo Colon, Kris Benson, A.J. Burnett, Mark Prior, Kerry Wood, Javier Vazquez, Freddy Garcia, Derek Lowe, C.C. Sabathia, Vicente Padilla, Odalis Perez ... and so on.

This was not a great World Series for agents and the free-agent market. Bonds is a separate entity, because he is far and away the best player of his generation, with Alex Rodriguez in the fast lane. But Brian Sabean and Bill Stoneman proved that you don't have to have your team built with stars at every position, that character and judgment count, and that a Scott Spiezio can improve and that somewhere there is a David Bell. "I think," says Sabean, "that this Series may make January the most important free-agent month of this offseason."

It was also not a good World Series for television ratings. While those who run the game may turn their heads and attribute the ratings to the East Coast sniper distractions, the New York obsession with Lou Piniella and the general malaise for national sports products, including Monday Night Football, they'd better not. Baseball does have a perception problem, and three years of preaching that small- and middle-market teams had no chance and that the game was nothing but a Mercenary Territory with five-sixths of the season spent focused on millionaires and billionaires Jello-wrestling have created serious damage that only a creative, concerted effort will turn around.

The owners have to realize that the public has to like the players and understand why what the players do is so extraordinary, which means the commissioner's office needs to go from being imperial to being democratic. The players have to rid their association office of the notion that this is an ongoing class struggle and that players should be compensated for being available, and understand that if they really want to do something for the next generation of players, they need to walk the streets and the aisles and help sell the game and the fact that 90 percent of them are good guys who love their business and playing the game.

It was a wonderful, fun World Series, from the privilege of watching Bonds to the ferocity of the Eckstein/Erstad contingent, to the Rodriguez-Bonds confrontations, right down the to the hilarity of the film clips announcing the arrival of the Rally Monkey and, finally, the Mickey Monkey's final magic, down five runs in Game 6 with Felix Rodriguez, Tim Worrell and Robb Nen unable to get the final eight outs. But somehow, somewhere, something got lost in the translation, just as one felt that Game 6 loss fall on Barry's back as he stood in left field.