Picture it: 1951. Let's put the setting in black-and-white, back when baseball players wore those really baggy pants.

The New York Giants stunned the Brooklyn Dodgers in a 3-game playoff tiebreaker. Your Dodgers were on the verge of clinching the pennant. Then, in the ninth, the Giants' Bobby Thomson hit the Shot Heard 'Round the World - a homerun to yank the pennant away from the Dodgers and rip their hearts out. 50 years later, we still remember that hit - and we remember it with its own proper title.

It was that big.

Ladies and gentlemen: Payback's a bitch.

Picture it: Today. Your Los Angeles Dodgers vs. the San Francisco Assholes. (...sorry, "Giants") Bottom of the ninth. Dodgers down 3-0 to the Cheaters. (...sorry, "Giants") Dodgers down to their last three outs.

Dodgers lose this game, and it's big - really big, for reasons probably too boring to go into for your average semi-non-baseball person. Just know it's huge, like along the same lines of the fate of the free world.

It's that big.

Your Dodgers tie the game 3-3! I'm on the phone with my buddy Greg while watching the computer "GameCast" and going into heart failure (I know, pathetic, right? ...About the GameCast, not the heart failure.)

And I thought the most exciting part of my day was covering the annual Evanston "Duck Pluck" - a charity rubber duck race. (And yes, I said a rubber duck race.)

Anyways, bases loaded for your Los Angeles Dodgers, only one out! A team brought back from the brink of disaster by tying - but they have a chance to win right here and clinch the division. It's one out, so all Steve Finley has to do is hit a fly ball to the outfield. Runner tags at third and runs home. That's all he has to do.

You know what Steve Finley does?

Do you know the recent history of the Dodgers? Of ripping out the hearts of their fans with fantastic September collapses?

With that history in all of our minds, you know what Finley does, facing our rivals? The Yankees of the West?

He hits it out of the park.

Grand Slam.

GRAND FUCKING SLAM!! HOLY SHIT!

I didn't even see it, and I was running around my apartment screaming and shouting like a madman. (OK, not "like" a madman...) Today I was the only baseball fan in Chicago doing a dance of joy, Balkie Bartokomus-style.

I didn't even see it. The greatest moment in Dodger history since Gibson's 89 shot off Eckersley. And I didn't even see it.

I suffer and I rejoice simultaneously. I cry and I laugh. Pleasure meet pain. Hey agony? This is ecstacy.

Wow. Next stop, playoffs. (I forgot what that looked like!)

(In case anyone's interested, here's an ESPN breakdown of today's game.