I told myself that three in a row was plenty, that they had proved the greatness of the dynasty win or lose. You know any team can beat any other team on a given day--it all depends on the breaks.

And this year, so many times again it looked as though we were on death's door. I'm laughing right now (even while crying) about all the epitaphs that were being written in the press, when the A's had us down 0-2 and their foot on our neck, heading into the Coliseum where they had won 17 in a row and swept us twice this season. The Holy Trinity that brought us the miracle that time was Mussina's pitching, Jorge's homer, and Jeter's play. Seattle trounced us by a double-digit margin, we came back and trounced them in the elimination game.

And then the ninth inning two-out homers. The series never would have gone beyond five games if that crazy Yankee magic hadn't reared its head two nights in a row, Tino and Brosius, our men on the corners who may be gone next year, going deep, and then the Yankees prevailing in extra innings. Brosius himself said you don't really want to wait until the last out to start hitting, but he'd take it. For us, the fans, it was an incredible lift. Both games had us groaning and wondering if the miracles had run out... and then there would be another one.

We thought Soriano gave us another one last night. The homer off Schilling, taking a splitter off the ground and golfing it into the stands to make it 2-1? Unbelievable.

They fought to the very end. The bottom of the ninth, game seven. I don't feel bad about that. I wrote on yankeebaseball.net that I thought an era was over, with Paulie and Sojo retiring, and the guys who won't be back next year, but that the dynasty was still there. Maybe. To take it to the wire, to the last possible inning, it was a great accomplishment, great baseball. And nothing to be ashamed of or sad about. That's what I told my mom on the phone, when I talked to her after the game last night. I told my friends, who have put up with me camping out in front of their tv for the past several weeks, that I was at peace with what happened.

But today, it hurts.

O'Neill said in the papers that a lot of people's hearts were probably broken in New York. Last night I scoffed at that. What a great series they gave us, so many miracle moments, one of the greatest ever. Heartbroken? Nah. A little sad maybe, that the miracle couldn't go one more inning. That there would be no storybook ending this time. It didn't feel like heartbreak.

But my heart is so sore already, not from the Yankees, but from life. The rubble at Ground Zero is still burning, I'm home alone all day now that my honey had to close his company and take a job elsewhere, money is bad, the book business is bad, we're at war, I wonder if I should wear rubber gloves to open the mail, politicians are using the war as an excuse to ram bad legislation through, and baseball season is over. I guess baseball has been my all-natural form of Prozac for a few years now, playing it, reading about it, watching it, and the Yankees have definitely been the most potent prescription. But today the world seems like too much to handle. Would it be otherwise if they had won? Maybe.

It wouldn't have been a heartbreaker if my heart weren't already sore.

It's so weird. Every time I think about one of those home runs, or the Jeter play, or standing in the upper deck singing New York, New York with 56,000 other fans, I smile. The Yankees have brought me a ton of happiness, no question. What a ride. What a season. Think back to Opening Day. I wanted to be there when they raised the Championship flag because the 2000 title meant so much to me, we fought so hard for it and it was almost like I couldn't believe they did it. That's what corwin and I were saying to each other, all the way home from the friend's house where we watched Game Five last year, we couldn't believe they had won it. After all that, it was hard to believe they won.

This year, after all that, it's hard to believe they lost. They beat our best, I said to my friends after Gonzo had that bloop hit. Joe Torre said the same thing a few minutes later. It all happened so fast, like a multi-car pileup on the freeway. All of a sudden there's a man on base, there's an error, there's the tying run, there's the winning run! Strangely, it doesn't hurt me to think about the specifics of what happened. It was a great game. Schilling and Johnson are great pitchers. I'm really overusing the word "great." But it's hard not to.

So I'll have my cry. Winter is here and it's time to get back to reality, I guess. Anthrax and terror, a bad economy, time to insulate my windows and hope heating prices don't skyrocket. It feels like life is hard right now, hard to keep up with, hard to succeed at, just hard work. Don't ask me why it seems easier when there's baseball. Maybe it really is my natural anti-depressant. I guess I've just got to put on a brave face and muddle through to the spring.

I've just got to keep thinking about all those great moments. It was freezing at Yankee Stadium on Opening Day, the first home game to open the season in several years. It was a storybook day, though, the white championship flag going up the pole, Roger Clemens became the all time AL strikeout leader, three home runs gave us the win. I remember Chuck playing his first major league game in left field and getting a standing ovation for catching a ball. The sun came out and got an ovation, too. It was a special day.

I remember Ted Lilly's debut against the Red Sox at the Stadium. I was there that, day, too. Ten strikeouts, wasn't it? That's as many as Rocket had last night. So many great games this season. Wasn't that one of those ninth inning magic games? Or was that the next day? Paul O'Neill hit a fly ball to right and ran to first in disgust -- but the ball cleared the wall to tie the game. And then David Justice, whose swing is more like O'Neill's than any other major leaguer, did the same thing, sending a ball into the short porch, just a shade deeper, to sink the Sox. A young boy had found a penny in the row of seats in front of us that day, just as we were getting seated. "This means the Yankees are gonna win," he told us. My mother turned to me during "New York, New York" and said, "hey, that little boy was right."

What a season. What a postseason. What a team. What a game. It's going to be a long, dark, cold winter. My heart does ache. But I feel better already.