Magic

The best thing about iconic moments, in sports and otherwise, is that they feel inevitable in retrospect. Of course Bryce Harper hit a two-run bomb in the eighth inning to win the Phillies the pennant. Doesn’t it seem now like the only way that game and the NLCS could have ended? Everything that happened before that fades away: the Padres taking the lead after that stupid wild pitch in the rain (giving me unpleasant flashbacks to Game 5 Part 1), the blown early lead in Game 2, even the disappointment that the Phillies might miss the playoffs altogether.

 

All of that fades away and here we are as the Phils get ready to take the field in Houston in the World Series, and it kind of feels like they were always meant to do so.

 

You really couldn’t have written a better ending to a deciding playoff game than Harper’s home run. I don’t know how you rank the most iconic moments in Philadelphia sports history, but that one is way at the top, and that’s not recency bias. Other big moments in sports can sneak up on fans, like a great performance when nobody was expecting it in a low-stakes game. Harper’s home run was decisive, as close to a walk-off as it gets, at dizzyingly high stakes, and when everyone’s eyes were on him.

 

File that soggy home run on Sunday as yet another example of how sports can bring people together. This week you could probably walk down the street and see a stranger wearing that red “P” and say to them, “How ‘bout those Phillies?” and get a smile. You don’t know that person; you might not even like that person if you got to know them. But you have that little, fleeting connection.

 

This is why we watch. To watch that baseball disappear into the stands and to be able to feel that exact same burst of joy with so many other people in your blast radius at the exact same time is a kind of magic.