Game 7: Diamondbacks 3, Yankees 2
Someday someone can sit for hours and determine if 2001 was the best World Series. Or 1991, 1975 or 1912, or one other. But this was unquestionably the most inexplicable.

Games 4, 5 and 7 had ninth-inning turnarounds that would have stunned Alfred Hitchcock -- around a 15-2 game that broke all sorts of records for absurdity -- which proves that it doesn't matter how one hypes it, there is no sporting event comparable to the World Series.

After a season of Barry Bonds, the Mariners and riveting drama, the World Series brought us the greatest collective ninth-inning comebacks in postseason history.

And as long as someone can replay Sunday night's ninth inning and show Mariano Rivera blowing the lead in the seventh game...

...we know that anyone can be president.

Were the Diamondbacks a two-man team?

Of course not. They had more quality positional player parts than any team in the postseason as the heroics of Tony Womack, Luis Gonzalez, Steve Finley, Craig Counsell and -- is this fun to say, or what? -- Mark Grace showed.

But those two parts were as dominant as any Ruth-Gehrig, Maris-Mantle film can glamorize.

The sight of Randy Johnson walking to the bullpen, then strolling to the mound, evoked any Knute Rockne emotion one could muster.

The sight of Curt Schilling, killed in a local paper as some kind of con man Sunday morning because he's one of those good souls who always has his heart out where it can be identified, scrolling through the first six innings in 18 batters. His matching idol Roger Clemens was testament to mind and heart over matter for someone who before this Series didn't do three days' rest.

And in the end, these two giants' numbers are in some ways more incomprehensible than the three ninth-inning dramas. Johnson and Schilling had nine of their team's 11 wins in the postseason, a 60-20 record in games they started from April until November, the starts in all four World Series victories, Johnson's three World Series wins and a combined postseason record of 9-1, 1.26 ERA, 89-1/3 innings pitched, 50 hits allowed, 113 strikeouts.

More than Koufax and Drysdale, Curt Schilling and Randy Johnson -- and, unlike Koufax and Drysdale, Simon and Garfunkel or Bush and Cheney, there is no proper first name, so it could be Johnson and Schilling -- these two men were the two best starters in the regular season, then went out and were better in the postseason.

These labels that folks like to throw around about postseason heart will never apply to Johnson and Schilling, as they've been lost around Roger Clemens, who survived another bad game of Yankee defense to leave with a 2-1 lead in the seventh inning. Johnson now assuredly joins Clemens in Cooperstown; Schilling needs a few more years of good health.

There were a lot of elements to this Series. The Yankees clearly grew weary from their month against the Athletics, Mariners and Diamondbacks, playing poor baseball.

Derek Jeter, the previous Mr. October, had three different injuries that left him a shadow of himself, yet such a shadow that he started the Yankees' first rally and made two great defensive plays, one charging a ball, the other on a relay to nail Danny Bautista at third base.

The Yankees' bench, relative to that of the Diamondbacks, was sadly thin.

But in the end, after a season of Barry Bonds, the Mariners and riveting drama, the World Series brought us two two-out, ninth-inning, game-tying homers, then something even more improbable -- the first postseason defeat of Rivera since 1997. It brought us two monumental heroes in Schilling and Johnson.

And now the season is over, and before the Yankees must decide who can stay and who must go, the owners meet in Chicago on Tuesday to ratify Bud Selig's stand on contraction.

That in turn will lead to a winter of draining conflict between billionaire owners and millionaire players that will freeze over what made this season so unforgettable. We now must be told that everything is wrong and that if indeed Montreal and Minnesota are going away, then the world-champion Arizona Diamondbacks are going to move to the American League West -- all of which may be more incomprehensible than the greatest collective ninth-inning dramas in World Series history.