Some three hours of baseball were played Saturday night between the moment the Boston Red Sox's starting pitcher departed the proceedings and the moment when Game 2 of the American League Division Series ended — three hours in which the outcome was still more or less malleable, and the Red Sox's hopes of stealing a win from the visiting New York Yankees went from unlikely to quite fathomable to dwindling to nil.
But because this is Boston, and because memories are long here, and because there is a history to account for, you can be assured that all anyone was talking about, as 39,151 fans trudged out of Fenway Park, tuned into sports-talk radio and bellied up to the corner bar, was the unimaginable, uncanny and unacceptable futility — not only Saturday night, but seemingly any time he climbs a mound with the stakes at their highest — of left-handed starter David Price.