It was an All-Star Game unlike any other.
That, of course, is because the first 78 All-Star Games actually ended.
Ah, but not this one.
It couldn't. It wouldn't. It almost didn't.
Midnight came and went. One o' frigging clock in the morning came and went.
Yet the All-Star madness went on and on, defying the odds, defying the baseball gods, defying every clock on every wall.
"I just know I looked up and it said 1:40 in the morning, and it was the 15th inning," said Twins first baseman Justin Morneau. "I never ever expected to come here and experience that."
"You know," said Mets reliever Billy Wagner, "this was what an All-Star Game was supposed to be -- except it's supposed to go nine innings."
This one, however, missed that standard slightly -- like by six.
Some day, some other bunch of All-Stars will find themselves in some crazed marathon kind of like this one. And when they do, we know that folks everywhere will do what we all did Tuesday night.
They'll thumb through the handy-dandy All-Star record book and look back on this night. And they'll learn that the American League finally beat the National League, 4-3, in 15 innings. And an unprecedented 4 hours and 50 thoroughly insane minutes. On a game-ending sacrifice fly by All-Star Game-winning specialist Michael Young.
But if that's all they find, they'll never know the half of it.
They'll never know that this night began with 49 Hall of Famers parading around the hallowed grass of Yankee Stadium, as a packed house shrieked -- and it ended with position players volunteering to pitch, managers reaching for the Advil bottles, and barely 20,000 comatose fans left in the seats.
They'll never know about all the totally impossible ways these teams found not to score.
They'll never understand how a player as talented as Dan Uggla could conceivably have had The Worst Night in All-Star History, joining the seldom-seen 3-Error, 3-Strikeout Club, with a double-play ball thrown in there as a bonus, just to make his personal torture chamber complete.
William Perlman/The Star-Ledger/US Presswire
The All-Star Game lasted four hours and 50 minutes to make it the longest Midsummer Classic ever.
And most of all, they'll never be able to comprehend how apoplectic the two managers -- not to mention Bud Selig and his baseball pooh-bahs -- were beginning to get as this interminable game kept rolling. Because it began to dawn on all of them that a night carefully designed to be the ultimate All-Star showcase had a reasonable chance to turn into the ultimate All-Star nightmare:
A tie.
An Uh-Oh-This-Time-It-Didn't-Count-After-All tie that threw both the Midsummer Classic and the entire postseason into chaos.
Yikes.
