Winning and losing. I stayed up late watching game 7 of the World Series, which went into extra innings and was incredible from start to finish, two Hall of Famers starting, one of them also batting leadoff and singling and making it all the way to third in the first inning so that his uniform was dirty front and back from sliding by the time he made it to the mound for his first pitches, Ohtani, making his sport at the highest stage like little league, when big early puberty kids like Rob Keyes pitched terrifying fastballs and batted leadoff in the little league manager of the Randolph Red Sox manager’s unorthodox, at that time, strategy of batting the biggest best kid first to give him more at bats. Ohtani wasn’t the hero as it turned out or even the most valuable Japanese player in the game, who turned out to be Yamamato, the pitcher, the final member of the entire starting pitching staff to enter the game and the one who got the stubbiest player since my childhood favorite Gary Muggsy Allenson, Alejandro Kirk, to break his bat and ground to my adulthood favorite Mookie Betts at shortstop—shortstop! nothing he can’t do!—who stepped on second and fired to first for a championship-clinching double play, and Kirk, it occurs to me now, should have fucking dropped down a surprise bunt with everyone way back at double-play depth afraid of his laser-beam line drives and banking on his incredibly slow speed because as slow as he is a dribbler bunted up the third base line would have stunned the world into enough of a freeze that time itself would have stood still and Alejandro Kirk would have been able to to make it to first on his choppy sprinting legs, like Muggsy all those years ago against the slack-jawed California Angels, and on we could have gone, further into the morning, tied again, and eventually Kershaw and god knows who else was left would have to be revealed in the unforgettable revelation, until the point in the night when once a year time does not only stand still but because of our human collective bureaucratic idiocy moves backward and we have an extra hour again to undo all of our mistakes and somehow keep believing it may all end not in the hopeless quicksand sprint of Alejandro Kirk to first but somehow in sweeping flying joy
Cardboard Gods 
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