It becomes theater. It becomes chaos. It becomes a three-hour fever dream with no intermission and no plan for how to end.
Game 7 was one of those nights.
The Dodgers and Blue Jays didn’t just finish a season — they hijacked it. Eleven innings of disbelief. Adrenaline. And noise so loud you could almost see it. The kind of night that reminds us why no sport bruises the heart quite like this one.
Try explaining Game 7 without your voice cracking.
Miguel Rojas, lifetime .260 hitter, stepped in with one out in the ninth — the Dodgers two outs from watching their season end — and swung himself into folklore, launching a home run so improbable that even Statcast needed a second look.
Moments later, two plays at the plate captured everything this sport does best — timing, tension, and theatrical brilliance.
And the palpitations continued.
When Ernie Clement rocked a fly ball deep to left with two outs in the ninth on Saturday night at the Rogers Centre, all Toronto needed was the runner from third to cross. For a heartbeat, it looked like Clement had delivered the biggest swing of his life, a swing that might have rewritten the city’s baseball history.
But baseball has a way of twisting mid-air.
From straightaway center, Andy Pages took off like he’d been launched, sprinting more than 120 feet to left and plowing through Kiké Hernández in a collision so violent the crowd gasped. Somehow, when the dust cleared, the ball was still in Pages's glove. The run never scored. The inning, and the Dodgers’ season, stayed alive.
And finally Will Smith, the catcher who hasn’t taken a postseason inning off since dial-up internet, launched the eleventh-inning blast that broke Toronto’s heart, and maybe a few televisions north of the border.
The Dodgers never led until that swing.
They never looked comfortable after it either. Even victory felt fragile.
It was a night where baseball threw the script into Lake Ontario and let the waves write the ending.
You want myth? Start with Yoshinobu Yamamoto.
Complete game in Game Two. Six innings in Game Six. Then, forty-eight hours later, two and two-thirds more in Game Seven, because apparently fatigue doesn’t translate from Japanese.
He didn’t have the ninety-seven-mph heater or the jaw-dropping splitter. What he had was command of the moment.
Forty years ago, Orel Hershiser did this in the same uniform. Now Yamamoto has his own chapter in Dodger scripture — the man who turned October into a test of human endurance.
By the time he handed off the ball, his jersey looked like it had survived a monsoon, and forty-five thousand fans stood roaring in a language older than metrics.
Toronto didn’t lose. It endured.
George Springer, taped together and running on grit, still found three hits.
Bo Bichette, hobbling like a man carrying the weight of a nation, delivered a three-run blast that briefly tilted the continent.
Clement, twice designated for assignment, finished the Series hitting .387 — numbers usually reserved for legends or typos. He ended the postseason with a record 30 hits and a .411 batting average.
And Louis Varland, the bullpen metronome, appeared in fifteen of the Jays’ eighteen postseason games.
They were one bounce from rewriting history. Baseball didn’t allow it.
Because baseball never promises justice; it promises drama.
There were 364 pitches thrown, 37 players used, and countless hearts broken. Statcast can measure distance and velocity, but not what this game did to everyone watching.
Every generation gets one of these.
1975 had Fisk’s wave.
1991 had Puckett’s leap.
2016 had the Cubs and the rain delay that lasted a century.
Now 2025 has this eleven-inning kaleidoscope.
Somewhere in L.A., a kid is begging for a Yamamoto jersey.
Somewhere in Ontario, another is learning that heartbreak is the tuition fee for fandom.
That’s how baseball grows, not through marketing plans, but through nights like this, when the game spins off its axis and somehow lands exactly where it belongs.
It ended in Toronto, a city holding its breath long after the last out found its way into Freddie Freeman's glove. The Dodgers spilled out of their dugout in a roar of relief while forty thousand fans stood in that hush you only hear when a dream evaporates.
For the Dodgers, it was validation — the first repeat champions of the twenty-first century, a team that turned pressure into muscle memory. For the Blue Jays, it was the kind of heartbreak that clings to a franchise for decades.
Yamamoto stood in the middle of it all, drenched in champagne and disbelief. He’d thrown more innings in a week than some pitchers do in a month, and now he was holding a trophy that might as well have been forged from exhaustion.
Baseball doesn’t always hand you a perfect ending. But when it does, it looks like this — a visiting clubhouse echoing with laughter, a home crowd frozen in awe, and a season collapsing into the kind of chaos that keeps you counting the days until spring.
And as the Dodgers lined up for their champagne-soaked photo on foreign turf, baseball whispered its favorite promise:
We’ll do it all again in February.
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