SAN FRANCISCO -- The Giants are by any analysis an old baseball team, but one that will bring a minimal amount of World Series experience to Anaheim on Saturday night. Livan Hernandez, Robb Nen, Kenny Lofton and Jay Witasick and the only ones who have been to the Fall Classic.

Thus, their celebration after finishing off the St. Louis Cardinals, 2-1, in the fifth game of the National League Championship Series was an oddly muted one --- except, strangely enough, for Shawon Dunston.

Dunston was raw and exposed --- the quintessential megaveteran finally reaching the big stage after an entire career watching other people do it while he played catch with his kids in the yard in October.

Dunston, the oldest of this team's old heads who has taken to calling his position "teammate," lurched wildly from sodden hugs with front-office personnel to crying uncontrollably into his left hand.

One moment, the 39-year-old Dunston was jumping up and down with an equally drenched assistant general manager Ned Colletti, a former media relations director in Chicago, and shrieking in unison, "TWO CHICAGO CUBS ARE GOING TO THE WORLD SERIES!"

The next, he is losing a battle with his tear ducts as he says, "Darryl Kile is going to the World Series. He's going with me."

Dunston had been the afterest of thoughts for the Giants this season --- a .231 average, one homer, nine RBI, didn't even appear in half the games. His only notoriety came when the talk shows and newspapers suggested he be released to make room for Tom Goodwin.

But it was his ringing single in the ninth inning, wedged perfectly between David Bell's two-out single to left-center and just before Lofton's game-winner to right, that helped put the Giants over the top for only third time in their 45-year history in San Francisco.

And it was his emotions that were most in evidence in the happy but plainly weary postgame celebration that spilled out of the clubhouse and onto the field.

While Barry Bonds treated the whole thing like a deposition, and Jeff Kent tried to sound as much like Jack Webb as possible, and the rest of the everyday Giants were just trying to catch their breath after escaping the Cardinals one last time, Dunston was raw and exposed --- the quintessential megaveteran finally reaching the big stage after an entire career watching other people do it while he played catch with his kids in the yard in October.

He thanked Dusty Baker, Tony La Russa and Bobby Valentine. He thanked Brian Sabean. He thanked Peter Magowan. He thanked his teammates. He thanked his family. He thanked the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences. He ran out of people to thank, and he kept thanking them, in hopes that maybe relentless repetition might allow them to hear him from thousands of miles away.

He stopped just short of thanking the Anaheim Angels, though, only because he really couldn't come up with a causative link between his career and theirs. The Giants may claim they are fame's illegitimate stepchildren, hidden from East Coast view by not only the curvature of the earth but also the shadow of the Bondsian Colossus, but the Angels could qualify for the Federal Witness Protection Program.

Not that either team deserves that, given the way they play and the way they have entertained this October. But this is how the World Series is going to be made to shake out until new stars are made to join the old one.

And the candidates are many and varied. Could be Bonds or Garret Anderson ... Rich Aurilia or Adam Kennedy ... Felix Rodriguez or Francisco Rodriguez.

Hey, it could even be Shawon Dunston.

True, that may not be the way to bet, but it isn't a half-bad thought. He's put in 18 years, none harder than this one, and even if he thinks of himself as only a ""teammate," he is still a teammate who helped get the Giants to one of the three most improbable World Series matchups of the last half-century --- after Braves-Twins in 1991, and Dodgers-White Sox in 1959.

And he will be a hell of a teammate.

Ray Ratto is a columnist with the San Francisco Chronicle and a regular contributor to ESPN.com