Let's cut to the chase: I won't live long enough, you won't live long enough, and maybe our kids won't live long enough either.

Are you kidding me? Live long enough to see another World Series like the one we just did?

Take your vitamins.

There are no statistical regressions that could calculate the chances of it. The chances of something as jaw dropping as back to back miracles from the bats of a team on its death bed? The improbability of a staggered underdog slaying the most dominant closer of all time in his prime, at his ultimate hour? This was the stuff of legend, the stuff of a lifetime.

It was validation for why we watch sports in the first place. A delicious payoff for the hours invested, a reward for the commitment to follow our sports, and the passion to continue to create a sense that the outcomes matter.

Make no mistake, watching sports can be a long and dismal exercise in futility. For every "classic" that comes along, we sift through at least three dozen dreadful Seahawk-Cardinal games. Super Bowls are usually wipeouts, World Series end in sweeps where you can barely remember more than two starting pitchers, NBA Finals (at least those without Jordan, Magic, or Bird ... which is not many in my lifetime) can be loathsome even while going the distance. Anybody remember the 1994 Rockets-Knicks series for anything other than OJ's Bronco ride, and the fact that John Starks built a brick outhouse from the field in Game 7?

Thought so.

But then ... well ... then comes Tino Martinez with two outs in the bottom of the ninth. And Jeter in extra frames. And you wake up the next day (not even a Yankee fan) and say to yourself how great it is to be a sports fan. You relish the nuances of the game you sacrificed that sensible bedtime to watch. Pitch for pitch, moment for moment, with not a single guarantee that anything special whatsoever might happen.

It ain't about seeing the highlights on SportsCenter. By then, the sheer wonder of the moment is long gone. Oh you'll see the play on the highlights, but you won't see the two and a half minutes of reaction shots at a Yankee stadium that has gone deliriously insane. The quick cut to a distraught Byung Hyung Kim, followed by Curt Schilling with his head in his hands, and Bob Brenly stunned like a statue.

The images come by in a hurry, and burn in your brain for a lifetime. Your skin tingles and your toes are numb. Did you just see what you just saw? You are pretty sure, but you'll check the sports page first thing in the morning just to make sure. This is why we watch.

The next day, I said on my radio show that we might not see a moment like that in baseball for another decade. Quickly checking history, the last great moment of that caliber was perhaps the 1997 Game 7 win by the Marlins on an Edgar Renteria grounder up the middle. But given that it happened for an expansion team, with a "roster-by-catalog," in a football stadium that still wasn't totally full, it's clearly not in the same league.

Rewind further and you'll find Joe Carter's walk off homer in 1993 at the SkyDome. Again, great moment, home crowd energy, hero-goat dynamic. But not in the house of legends. Sid Bream in 1991? Puckett's Game 6 home run at the Metrodome the same year? Gibson in 1988, the Red Sox fiasco in 1986? All pretty damn good. Maybe as good or a touch better.