Photograph by Jeff Curry
The good news about Game 6 of the 2011 World Series is that if you caught any two or three innings of it, you may have unwittingly found yourself in possession of the entire game in miniature. You probably caught an unconscionable defensive lapse from the Cardinals or Rangers; you likely saw David Freese do something heroic; you no doubt saw the Cardinals fall behind the Rangers so disastrously that the visitors' locker room was wrapped in cellophane and bedecked with champagne. All these things happened two or three or four times, and every time the Cardinals managed to shock the Rangers, the broadcasters, the fans, and themselves, and that—all the way up to David Freese's last incredible swing—is why people will never stop talking about Game 6 of the 2011 World Series.
This is not to say that the Cardinals don't need to win Game 7, or that they will—it's only to say that 20 years from now when you're telling your children why they're named David, Lance, and Alexi Ogando Williams it won't matter much whether you go on to say the Cardinals won their second championship of the Tony La Russa era the next night or just fail, meaningfully, to mention the next night at all. This was it—this was what you wait whole seasons and postseasons to see. Players succeeding and failing in the most remarkable moments of their careers; fanbases careening between anxiety, jubilation, and depression from pitch to pitch and inning to inning.
You're lucky, sometimes, if you see that once in an entire World Series. You were lucky, Thursday night, just by sitting down and watching the whole brutal, unbelievable thing.
