CINCINNATI — The final pitch was filthy, 94 miles per hour and tilting away from Jay Bruce, and even as he swung he knew how fruitless a task that was. Travis d’Arnaud caught it, squeezed it, pointed toward the sky. Jeurys Familia, who’d thrown it, also pointed, then pounded his glove.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
“We did it!” Familia screamed, in Spanish.
“We did it!” d’Arnaud barked back, in English.
They did it, and even in the afterglow of an almost-perfect 10-2 drubbing of the Reds, even as the magic number shrunk to zero and the hats were passed around, identifying them as NL East champions, the whole story almost seemed frosted by fiction.