All across the long, hot summer lay the promise that a night like this was awaiting the Yankees on the other side, in autumn. Every night, Aaron Boone would fill out a lineup card authored as much by imagination as ingenuity, fresh names spackled in there, fill-ins, irregulars, stand-ins.
There was a charm to that, sure, because the Yankees started winning a couple of weeks into the season, no matter how Boone crafted the batting order, no matter if the names were as unfamiliar to him as if he were scouring an out-of-town phone book. They kept winning, and winning, and that became the mantra of a year that saw 30 different players make a total of 39 trips to the injured list: next man up, and all that.