Kansas City Royals players celebrate on the field – Credit: Jeff Curry-USA TODAY Sports
There’s a SportsCenter tweet that’s circled around quite a bit during the past two weeks, and if we calculate the odds of all of those comebacks from the tweet going our way, based on the percentages, there was about a 1 in 1.7 million chance of winning all of those games at those particular moments. Anything, and everything, we had learned since 2014’s Wild Card game, was actually possible.
In separate games this postseason, the Royals had win probabilities of:
— SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) November 1, 2015
18%
1%
25%
8%
10%
16%
They won all of those games.
After Cain walked to open the ninth, my chin lifted from my hands. I elbowed my buddy, hard, and we locked eyes in disbelief. Dude, it’s happening again.
That is when I felt a World Series victory was a real thing, and a thing that wasn’t just for everyone outside of Kansas City. This, too, could be ours.
Our seats were so bad that I didn’t even know what Eric Hosmer’s double looked like until watching the replay around 4:00 am that night; our seats were directly above the left field wall, and all we saw was a liner shoot towards us, followed by Cain rounding the bases, and then, silence. And it was mostly silence from then on, until we made our way down behind the Royals dugout for the bottom of the twelfth.
When the Royals tied it in the ninth – after having witnessed the same comeback story seven other times for three weeks straight – that’s when we knew there would be no Game 6.
There was hush through the stands, save for an infrequent, underwhelming “Let’s Go Mets” chant that would quickly fizzle, and my toes tapped nervously on the ground, cognizant that I may be witnessing history.
When Christian Colon got his second strike, I smacked my hands together and felt the doubt begin to creep back in. And then, as his line drive fell into left field (unlike Hosmer’s, in plain sight), our row, the six Royals fans, jumped into the air with arms flailing and shrieks and hoots and bellows erupting from inside.
And that’s when I really felt it. That is when I felt a World Series victory was a real thing, and a thing that wasn’t just for everyone outside of Kansas City. This, too, could be ours.
Next: Chapter 4: 30 Years In The Making