This has been the Division Series of No Sleep.

Okay, day one was okay, with all three games scheduled back to back at 1pm, 4pm, and 7pm--a marathon but doable. The only series left out of that equation was Boston at Oakland, which did not start until the following day at 10pm eastern. The start time was the subject of much grumbling here in Boston, but playing at what was seven pm Pacific time was probably to the Red Sox advantage, compared to playing at 4pm when the sun and shadows in the Network Associates Coliseum would be brutal and a home field advantage to the A's.

corwin worked late and I picked him up at 9:30 and we headed straight for our favorite sports bar, the Coolidge Corner Clubhouse in Brookline. We started going to the CCC back when it was the only smoke-free sports bar in the Boston area. Just a few days ago, the smoking ban for Cambridge/Somerville went into effect, but there are other reasons to pick the Coolidge, the main one being the huge menu and great food. I'm partial to the "Ty Cobb" salad, which is so large it takes about five innings to eat it, usually, and the "small" order of teriyaki chicken wings which takes both corwin and me to get through.

We got to the bar just at ten and the Braves/Cubs game was still going on, with every TV in the place turned to it. Damn Braves took the lead while we were standing there, waiting for a table. Many Red Sox fans must be picking the Cubs as a sentimental favorite because as soon as the Braves went ahead there was a collective groan from the crowd. That and they hate the Braves in Boston--not because there is any memory of the old Boston Braves who left tow, but because the modern Atlanta Braves, designated as Boston's "natural rival" in interleague play, have pummelled the Red Sox year after year. (Note that this year they didn't play the Braves for the first time, and look, they made the postseason...)

They then switched most of the televisions over to Oakland. Johnny Damon was just taking the first pitch from Tim Hudson for a strike as we sat down.

This game is well-chronicled elsewhere, I am sure, so I won't go into ALL the details--and there were a lot of them--just a few. More twists and turns than an Alfred Hitchcock movie. At first I wasn't even sure who I was going to root for. After all, I would love to see a Boston/New York ALCS. But my natural love for the A's won out, and when Todd Walker hit that home run in the first my instant reaction inside was: damn! Everyone else in the bar was screaming with joy. Ah well.

Now, normally we'd stay to the end of the game, or until the bar closed, which was usually around the same time (1 a.m.) but we knew we had to get up early Thursday so corwin could get to work early--because we planned to leave Boston at two in the afternoon to get to Yankee Stadium for Game Two of that series. So we left after Walker's second home run of the night, off Ricky Rincon, who had come in to relieve Hudson who had been brilliant but had cramps in his pitching hand. Damn. 4-3 Red Sox.

We got in the car and the A's got out of the inning. Pedro came out to pitch the bottom of the seventh.

For most of the drive home, Erubiel Durazo was at bat, and I am not kidding you. It was a 12 or 13 pitch at bat, with lots of stepping off the rubber, stepping out of the box, etc. The A's came very close to tying the game that inning, but Durazo's long battle with Pedro ended up with a walk to load the bases with two out. Then Eric Chavez popped up. By that time I was sitting in the car in front of the house, waiting for the inning break so I could run inside.

We put the radio on inside the house and started getting ready for bed. Then, in the bottom of the ninth, at around one in the morning, the A's tied the score and sent it to extra innings. It was just as well we'd left the bar early, I guess. We got in bed with our scorecard and the radio on. There were walks. There were strikeouts. There was Derek Lowe, making his first relief appearance in over two years. The innings crawled by. When it hit the twelfth, I decided, damn it, when it hits three a.m. I am shutting the radio off and going to sleep. Besides, my scorecard only fits 12 innings.

I often don't sleep well before I'm going to see the Yankees. It's a kid-on-Christmas kind of thing, anxiety and anticipation and nervous energy. But by the end of the twelfth, I was ready to conk out. For one thing, it had gotten so late. And for another, the A's provided a happy ending--Durazo walked, erased on a fielder's choice and replaced by Chavez who beat out a double play throw, then moved to second on what could have been another double play except the A's had the hit and run on. Two outs. Then he stole third. (The A's stole a base!) Hatteberg walked and then HE stole a base! (Well, defensive indifference, maybe.) That left first base open so Lowe intentionally walked Terrence Long to load the bases. Up came Ramon Hernandez, a catcher with some pop in his bat. I figured he'd mash the ball somewhere, A's style. Instead, with one strike on him, he laid down a bunt to third that so stunned everyone in the park that poor Bill Mueller, though the bunt came pretty hard to him, had no play. Chavez scored. A's won on a walk off bunt. Crazy.

Nothing like a marathon intense postseason game with a happy ending as a palliative. I slept like a proverbial baby eight straight hours, woke up at 11am to find corwin gone to work, and then set about packing for the road trip. I felt sorry for corwin, who had slept much less than I did, but if I was going to be driving at three a.m. the next morning, it was probably good that I slept in.

We hit the road from his office at two o'clock on the dot. We briefly considered making a side trip back to the Coolidge Corner Clubhouse, where as it turned out he had left his coat the night before, but I knew with traffic and such we would be cutting it close. So we went right to the highway.

The plan was to meet Lori, my agent, and Stephen, the editor for my book on the Yankees, at six o'clock at will call, and then go off to the pizza joint we love so much up the road from the stadium. Four hours. The sun was shining, there was not too much traffic on the Mass. Pike, and I put the cruise control at 75 mph. Dark clouds began to gather around Worcester. Then it rained! There's not supposed to be no stinkin' rain! I wasn't worried, really--the forecast for the Bronx had said it would be cold, but not wet. Still, we drove in and out of showers through all of Connecticut. And saw an intense rainbow in the sunshower. "A good omen," I said.

A five p.m. we crossed the border into New York on the Hutchinson Parkway and immediately ran into bumper-to-bumper traffic. At 5:30pm we had only moved six or seven miles. We got off the Hutch onto the Cross County, then onto Route 87, the Major Deegan Expressway. It was clear for about a mile and then stopped dead also. Should have taken the Mosholu Parkway to Grand Concourse. Oh well. We were stopped dead in traffic and it was now six o'clock. Meanwhile, the A's had been beating the Red Sox 5-1 for quite some time now--the score hadn't changed since the second inning. Traffic is easier to take when there is a ballgame on.

I finally decided that staying on the Deegan was a losing proposition all the way around. It was clearly going to be like that all the way to the Stadium and we could not progress any slower through the side streets. So I got off at West Fordham Road, thinking I'll make a left and go across until I hit Grand Concourse.

The Authentic New York Squeegee Man who greeted us on the off ramp was wearing a worn out old New York Yankees cap and had actual soap in his squeegee. He did a pretty nice job. And when I rolled down the window he didn't even wait for me to ask. "Left on Fordham," he said, pointing to his Yankees hat, "then right on Jerome Avenue when you reach the elevated train." Of course! We'd hit Jerome before Grand Concourse, and the parking lot we wanted was right under the El tracks anyway.

The elevated rail line in the Bronx is the one you see in the movie The French Connection. Jerome Avenue runs two ways under the tracks, with lanes on either side of the stanchions which are close together and tricky to maneuver at slow speeds, much less car chase speeds. We couldn't go all that fast, though, because of the traffic.

At 6:15 we were three blocks from the parking lot and in a long line of cars all trying to get into it. Cell phone calls determined that Lori was just parking her car and walking toward the stadium, and Stephen was already at will call, watching his favorite football player, Wayne Chrebet (sp?) walk by. (Sorry, I don't follow football.) Fifteen minutes later we had moved one block. corwin and I swapped places, leaving him to park the car since I had to pick up the tickets with my credit card.

This was a great improvement over last year's adventure--I had left Boston at 3pm and arrived in the vicinity of Yankee Stadium to find every single parking lot full and didn't even get into the building until the second inning. The plan to walk over for pizza was quickly evaporating though, as seven o'clock neared. At least it did look as if corwin was going to make it into the lot. I called him as I walked past the entrance to say it looked good--they were still letting cars in and his line was moving.

At least there were no snafus picking up the tickets, and Lori and Stephen were easy to find. Then my cell phone rang. It was my brother Julian, coming down the Deegan from his new job at Pepsi in Purchase, NY. Now, my family traditionally approached the stadium from the Jersey side. When we were kids we lived in Englewood, and hopping onto the George Washington Bridge was easy from there. We even learned the "back way" to the Stadium, exiting at the Harlem River Drive south, then an immediate exit and a left at the light onto the Macombs Dam Bridge, avoiding the Deegan altogether.

"I'm in some horrible traffic," Julian said.

"Are you at West Fordham Road?"

"I think I'm coming to the University Heights Bridge."

"Get off! Get off! Get off!" I yelled into the phone. (It was pretty noisy outside the Stadium.) "Make a left on Fordham and then a right, follow the elevated train right to the Stadium!" He was, in fact, just approaching the West Fordham exit. "But Jul, you'll never get into a parking lot at the stadium, now. When you get to about 175th street there's a non-Yankee lot there. Just park there and walk or you'll be sitting in your car until the second inning, or worse." Words of Wisdom From The Voice of Experience.

Now, when we had bought our tickets was just last Monday. I had called my brother on the phone to find out if he'd take two of four I was thinking of buying off Ebay, if it turned out Lori and Stephen didn't want them. While we were on the phone, though, we just clicked over to Ticketmaster.com "just to see." Often, extra seats are released in the 24 to 48 hours before a game. "I'm showing two tickets here in Section 34," he said. "I'm just going to take them!"

So I clicked on myself, and although it showed no tickets available, I kept trying and eventually got two in section 35. Then I got two in Tier 11. I called him back. "Would you swap your section 34 tickets for the upper deck?" Sure he would. We figured if me, corwin, Lori, and Stephe were in adjacent sections, we could probably get someone near us to swap seats.

The miscalculation we made, though, was that we forgot that the way Yankee Stadium is numbered it is all even numbers to right field, odd numbers to left field. So section 34 and 35 were actually the farthest apart you can get...

I told all this to the group once corwin arrived. We were all hungry by that time but decided to just go in and find food in there. The left field Food Court beckoned, and after a quick stop at the "Designated Driver" booth for a free Sprite (why not? it's free and I don't drink beer anyway) we went to find the Food Court PACKED. I mean wall to wall. "Look, they have a Wok And Roll here now!" I shouted over the din of the throng. We decided to check it out and discovered way over at the chinese food stand NO LINE AT ALL! Hey, is broccoli that frightening?

I think maybe Stephe put it best. When you're at the Stadium, everything is great. It didn't matter if the sauce was bland, if the fried rice had nothing but oil to flavor it, being there made it the best we'd ever had. We got our food, chicken and broccoli on fried rice, egg drop soup, dumplings, etc... and since we were near Julian's section 34 seats, we decided to sit in them while we ate. It was only 7:30 after all, so we had time to get to our own section. More than 50% of the seats were still empty. We climbed up into my brother's row and watched Brad Radke walk to the bullpen while we ate.

Here is Yankee arrogance at its worst. The Twins seem so inconsequential to us, we didn't even bother to boo Radke as he made his way over there. Now, if it was Pedro, or even Tim Hudson, he would have been hearing it. But Radke walked by like he was a bat boy. Here's another example. As I was walking to the seats, I passed two guys in Twins hats and full Twins regalia, jerseys, etc. I noticed the hats first, because I automatically look at people's hats to see what team they like. And when I first saw the two guys in Twins hats they might as well have been wearing San Diego Padres hats or something. My first thought was: how weird, wonder why those guys are here? Then it dawned--duh, the Twins are actually playing here tonight...

It is possible, of course, that the Twins will bounce the Yankees out of the playoffs. So we shouldn't be so dismissive of them. But it's hard not to be. Even if they beat us--and you know the mantra: "Anything Can Happen In A Short Series"--we know we have the better team, the better stadium, the longer history, etc. etc. Which isn't to say we don't want to beat them. We do. Especially after how we beat ourselves in Game One, when the Yankees lost 3-1 on a bunch of errors and sloppy play and accidents, not to mention a lack of clutch hitting resulting from pressing too much...

Anyway. We finished our food and then headed up to the Tier seats. We were just getting up to the section when Cheryl Howard, former Yankee catcher Elston Howard's daughter, sang the national anthem. And we were settling into to the right row when retired general Tommy Franks threw out the first pitch to "honorary catcher" Yogi Berra. And "Mr. October" Reggie Jackson was there to accompany general Franks to the mound. "Gee," corwin remarked to me, "don't you think that's kind of rubbing it in to the Twins?" Well, duh.

We all sat through the first half inning, in which Pettitte walked the leadoff man, but then set them down one-two-three. Then the folks whose seats corwin and I were in came and we moved up to the row behind Lori and Steve. Meanwhile the Yankees came to play. I had thought they would try to break out the lumber early, and Soriano, Jeter, and Giambi, batting in that order, all singled to load the bases. Up came Bernie Baseball, as we call him, who in spots such as this in past Octobers has delivered some massive hits. This time, a pop fly to shallow center, but deep enough to score Soriano. That was all they'd get. The people in our seats then came and we climbed down and headed for section 35. Jorge struck out. Matsui struck out. Damn. You know I am superstitious about getting up and down during innings, right? They were cruising along, then we got up, and they got shut down. Oh well, it's our fault for not going to our own seats right away.

corwin took a quick pit stop into a men's room on our way there. He went in, then Matsui struck out, and instantly a stampede of men came down the ramps and formed huge lines on either side. As we always do when making stadium pit stops, I waited for him to come out. Andy set the Twins down one-two-three. Still no corwin. Then the Yankees went down one-two-three. I began to worry that he had gotten sick in there. His stomach had been feeling crummy the whole trip and maybe chicken with broccoli wasn't the right thing...

The Twins came to bat in the third. Pierzynski hit a soft comebacker to Andy on the first pitch. Then Guzman struckout. Andy was cruising. Then Shannon Stewart, who had walked to lead off the game, singled. Well, there goes the no-hitter. Maybe that was what did it but I started to get really upset. Here I just drove four-plus hours to see a postseason game, and instead, I'm seeing the concrete wall outside a men's room. The line had dwindled down to almost nothing by this point and I considered asking someone male to go in and check if he was in there. I think Pierzynski moved up on a wild pitch at this point, I'm not even sure, that's how distracted I was getting. My feet were starting to hurt from standing there in the cold for half an hour. Then Luis Rivas struck out to end the inning and corwin appeared.

He had been looking for me, apparently, all this time. Even though I had been just standing there outside the men's room without moving. He had searched and didn't find me, so went off to the seats thinking I must have gone there. Then when I wasn't there, he came back. I burst into tears. I couldn't help it. My friends and I call corwin "Captain Oblivious" because he's so unobservant. He's the type who will open a drawer to look for a pair of scissors and not be able to see that the scissors are right there in front of him. And here I'd been thinking he was being sick in the men's room for a half hour and he was actually just clueless. "When I didn't see you I thought you went downstairs!" he protested.

"Why would I abandon you like that?" I shouted back. "We always, ALWAYS wait outside the restroom for each other. Why would I do something different now?"

Now, normally this kind of thing (it's not the first time corwin has done something like this) makes me peeved but doesn't bring me to tears. But something about baseball always brings those child-like feelings to the surface and I felt like a kid whose mother accidentally left her at the shopping mall. (Actually, when I was about three, I wandered away from my mom at a mall and SHE was the one who was nearly in tears... me, I was having a great time with all the sales ladies being nice to me and giving me lollipops and things. But you get the point.) All the stress of the long drive and the anxiety over the traffic and the snafu of the seats ... I just couldn't take it anymore. And not only that, we had the bases loaded and no outs in the first and could only scratch one measly run!

Well, I cried all the way to our seats and Soriano made out somehow while we were doing that. We sat down just in time to stand up again as Jeter hit a fly ball into center... caught. Then Giambi had a big swing at one, got under it, popped to right. I had forgotten entirely about the restroom incident already.

The view from Section 35 was a familiar one, though one I haven't seen since the 1970s. My family used to sit in that section a lot when my mom and I were crazy about Reggie Jackson. We used to get those tickets often, and stare at that #44 and scream at him (from my family, mostly nice things). Jacque Jones, #11, got a different reception from the fans. As he ran to take his position in the bottom of the fourth, having struck out to end the top of the inning, the Bleacher Creatures and most of our section (directly adjacent to them) greeted him with a chant of "you suck!" complete with rhythmic finger pointing. Jones was having a laugh about it--I'm pretty sure he doesn't get that kind of greeting in any other stadium.

Brief moment of excitement in that inning as Jorge doubled, but he never got past third. Most of the emotion in the crowd at that point was frustration. Pettitte was tossing a gem but we were still afraid the bats would not come alive.

Then Torii Hunter led off the fifth with a home. Game tied. "All that work for nothing," the guy behind me said. Andy bore down after that--he later said the pitch was the only one all night where he got "careless," a fastball that he left over the plate after Hunter had swung through a great changeup--striking out Koskie. Then Pierzynski hit a dribbler in front of the plate and was out 2-3, or struck out and Jorge dropped the foul tip and so was put out K 2-3. From right field it's not that easy to tell, and our radio wasn't working right. Then Guzman reached on an error--Jeter got a ball low and threw low, past Johnson--and there was Jorge to back up the play right there. Our section let out a hip-hip-Jorge! But there was much grumbling. Were the Yankees going to throw away another ballgame with defensive mistakes? Shannon Stewart then singled, sending Guzman to third. Argh! But Rivas hit a hopper to Boone who rifled the ball to first, inning over. The error did not hurt except in making Andy throw a few more pitches.

The turning point of the game came in the seventh inning--in the seventh inning stretch. We in the Yankee Stadium crowd still remember Game 2 of the ALDS in 2001, the game that was delayed by half an hour so George Bush's "we are going to war in Afghanistan" address could be played over the Diamondvision. The whole city was like one giant wake that night. Tonight, Ronan Tynan, the Irish Tenor who sings quite often at the Stadium, came out to sing God Bless America. He sang, and we sang. The whole stadium sang. I am getting goosebumps remembering it. We didn't sing loud, but we sang together, and there is something about the sound of 56,000+ people in unison that just lifts the spirit. Heck, after that there were even more people singing Take Me Out to the Ballgame than usual. corwin returned from the men's room with the surreal observation of "guys singing 'God Bless America' while at the urinal." Nice.

Anyway, with the mood thus galvanized at the stadium, the crowd was at its peak. Nick Johnson led off the inning. "Come on, Nick, a hit, walk, hit by pitch, anything, let's just get it going!" a man behind us shouted. Nick obliged, getting drilled on his big, meaty body somewhere--from 400 feet away we couldn't quite tell where but it looked like his backside, maybe his lower back. (Ouch, kidneys.)

Then Juan Rivera came to the plate showing bunt--not a secret bunt-for-a-hit kind of bunt, but the "I'm going to lay one down and you're not going to be able to get him at second anyway," kind of bunt. It was a beauty, too, that rolled exactly parallel to the first base line. If the Twins hadn't played it perfectly, which they did, he might have even beaten it out. Johnson on second, mission accomplished. Something about that bunt just showed they were serious. Mariano Rivera got up in the pen. My god, they're going to play for one run and then bring Mo in for six outs. They're really really serious about taking this game.

The crowd responded to that kind of focus, and so did the Yankees. The Twins, meanwhile, replaced Radke with LaTroy Hawkins, who had knocked the bats right out of their hands the other day. Yes, it was possible he could do it again. But somehow we didn't think he would. Or they would get lucky. Someone might hit a broken bat blooper into no-man's land, anything...

It was better than that. Soriano lined a single, his third hit of the night, and Johnson scored. There was the one run, but now there was a man on and one out and Jeter at the plate. No one in our section sat down. No one in most of the stadium sat down. There was much cheering and screaming going on. After all, this was the Captain at the plate, and a guy who Gets It Done in October. In last year's ALDS he didn't even make an out until late in the second game. Jeter hit a Baltimore chop that kangarooed high in the air and busted it, like he always does, down the line to first. Hawkins had to wait for it to come down and then he fired it at 98 miles an hour--past the first baseman and somewhere that ended up with Jeter being awarded second base. Soriano meanwhile had gone all the way to third anyway. Second and third and one out, and now big Jason Giambi at the plate. He had been booed roundly in the opening game for striking out on three pitches with two men on. As Torre put it, he had been trying too hard to hit the ball "nine miles"--when if he would just be patient and let the game come to him his natural ability would put the ball into orbit. Giambi did not try to do too much. With two strikes, Hawk let one go over the middle of the plate and Giambi did what they teach you to do in hitting school--he hit it back up the middle so hard corwin couldn't even track the ball on the ground. Two runs scored. There was a frenzy of mutual-high-fiving of total strangers in my section. That was it for Hawkins, who didn't retire a man. In came J.C. Romero and the icing on the cake was not a two run homer from Bernie, but another hot grounder through the infield on the first pitch. Nice to see Bernie get a swing like that. Jorge and Matsui then grounded out, but the Yankees were up four to one with Mariano coming in. They had done it--they had broken through when they needed to most. And they did it with an old-fashioned rally, timely hits and taking full advantage of a defensive error.

It was all party after that. The first three outs only took about nine pitches for Mo to get, then we barely paid attention to the Yankee eighth--the scoreboard Cap Game was more gripping. (They say everything gets harder in the postseason and the Cap Game was no exception. At one point the ball even switched from one cap to another! But I guessed right: number three! And in the Subway Race I picked the #4 because of following the elevated track and, sure enough, it won also! So I am two-for-two in scoreboard games this October.) Mo came back out for the ninth. There was none of the worrying about broken bat bloops or if he's the same Mariano he used to be or anything. Just jubilant cheers for every strike. Mutual high fives. No one sat during the ninth, of course. When Pierzynski blooped the first pitch he saw right back into Mo's glove: ecstasy at 11:26 pm.

Then we high-tailed it to the restrooms--setting a specific meeting place!--as the sounds of Frank Sinatra filled the stadium. corwin's next observation: "guys singing along to New York, New York at the urinal was not as weird as 'God Bless America.'" It took about twenty minutes to leave the building and walk to our car, and about a half an hour to get out of the garage onto River Ave. We backtracked under the train to West Fordham and onto the Deegan, which was traffic free. When the postgame show on the radio ended we switched over to WFAN where they talk was all Yankees, as well. They interviewed Sweeney Murdi from the Stadium, and recapped the game endlessly. They played many clips from the interview room we had not heard on the postgame, and also played back the play by play highlights we had not heard because, let's face it, even if our radio had been working, the stadium is too loud while something exciting is going on to hear it. We stopped at a rest area up the Merritt Parkway and every person in there, except the attendant, was wearing a Yankee shirt or jersey. A few hours later, when we were north and east of Hartford, WFAN finally faded out and I switched to music. But I could have listened to people call in and recap the game all night.

We pulled into out neighborhood just after four in the morning. Yes, it's over two hundred miles each way. We had spent over eight hours in the car for three hours and seven minutes of baseball. Today I am bleary-eyed, exhausted, and hoarse. But it was worth it. It was corwin's first postseason game, too, so he finally got to experience the Stadium in October.

Now I hope they sweep the Twins at the Dome so they don't have to play a game five at the Stadium. Oh, we already have tickets for the game, but I don't think I have the stamina for it! In fact, I think I'm going to go back and have a nap right now before the Giants/Marlins game gets going at 4pm...