Making movies The Red Sox heroically end a cinematic season BY SAM PFEIFLE

Some day soon, representatives from the Boston Red Sox — some players, some owners, some hangers-on — will be parading the World Series trophy down Portland’s Congress Street. I’ll try not to go into too many histrionics about what this means to me. I do have some perspective. The birth of my daughter, my wedding day, the day I closed on my house — these were the best days of my life.

Still, watching Keith Foulke underhand the last out of the World Series to Doug Mientkiewicz (how many of you can spell that without bothering to look it up?) was pretty damn cool. People who know me are bored with my story of being 11 years old and going to bed with a two-run lead in the bottom of Game Six’s ninth inning in 1986, only to wake up to a tear-inducing loss. Now no one will have to hear it anymore.

Will I still feel the need to tell it? Maybe, but I’ll probably be able to restrain myself now. Soon I’ll be able to teach my daughter how to record the particulars of every Manny Ramirez at-bat in a notebook, the way I did for years with Dwight Evans. She’s heard hardly any of my Red Sox stories.

More than the sport, it’s the stories I love. The best thing for me about baseball is its long-unfolding cinematic quality, the daily soap opera. Every season has its moments you can point to as touchstones that nearly every fan remembers or would like to forget. Remember what one writer described as an "old-fashioned hockey face-wash"? Alex Rodriguez does.

No other sport works the same way. Football has too few games, the players too faceless in their masks. Basketball has too few characters, too many "stars," not enough role players. Hockey only gets interesting for the playoffs, the regular season acting like a prolonged advertising campaign for a much-anticipated mini-series. College sports are like shorts, ending just when they’re getting interesting. Minor sports are simply too hard to follow, like listening to someone talk about Six Feet Under when you don’t have cable.

Only baseball regularly furnishes those vignettes that become lasting conversation pieces and Jungian collective knowledge. There are plenty that stick out just from this past season. Like Bill Murray teeing off on peonies in Caddyshack, who can forget the first real glimpse we got of Manny the comedian, mugging for the cameras as diligent nerd (and now we find out, George Bush supporter) Curt Schilling pored over his game notes? Noticing the dugout camera’s red light go on, Manny waved, then looked to his left to find Schilling scribbling away. Manny scrunched himself up to mock Schilling’s studiousness then turned back to the camera and threw his hands at us: Pffft, who needs studying?

Broadcasters Jerry Remy and Don Orsillo belly-laughed and an off-season of talk about getting A-Rod for Manny was washed away.

But sometimes this season was more like Dancer in the Dark. Just like Bjork’s blind blue-collar dreamer in that film, Bronson Arroyo was mostly thought of as a reclamation project, picked up off the Pittsburgh Pirates’ scrap-heap two seasons ago. Our fifth starter this year, he actually got bumped from the rotation for the BK Kim experiment. How humiliating. Then, one late night on the West Coast against Seattle, we saw his dreams become reality as he recorded 12 straight outs via strikeout, doing his best Randy Johnson impersonation (substituting his own darting curveball for Johnson’s devastating slider) over seven thrilling innings.

Then, however, we and Bronson suffered the same horrible betrayal Bjork’s Selma experienced at the hands of her lying neighbor. Closer Keith Foulke gave up back-to-back homers in the bottom of the ninth inning to nullify a Jason Varitek three-run dinger from the eighth, and then we were forced to watch the Bjork-hanging-like Bret Boone grand slam off Curtis Leskanic in the eleventh inning as the clock struck 1:30 a.m.

You thought Selma was going to get her son that operation after all? Hah! The kid’s blind and she’s dead. Take that, Bronson.

For once, though, this season had a happy ending, just like most of the Hollywood productions we take our dates to, glad that we’re leaving the theater on a high note because maybe we’ll get lucky later. Anybody else flash to Return of the King during Game Seven against the Yankees this year? Just when the Sox had made it through Mordor — beginning Game Four like Frodo’s lifeless body in the Orc castle and triumphantly entering Mount Doom with Johnny Damon’s first-pitch grand slam off Yankee chump Javier Vazquez — there entered Pedro Martinez in the seventh inning, a glimmer of uncertainty.

What? You thought you’d seen the last of Gollum? No chance. The Yankee Stadium crowd roared like the will of the One Ring, pulling at Pedro’s determination as Hideki Matsui and Bernie William gnawed doubles off his hand. But then, like Frodo, Pedro summoned an inner strength and buzzed a series of 97 mph fastballs by an overmatched John Olerud and got Miguel Cairo to melt like the ring at the bottom of the river of fire.

From then on, it was all celebration as the ground sunk from underneath Sauron’s army of Yankees. In the end, there was nobody but Sox fans occupying Yankee Stadium and marching through the streets of the Bronx. Did the World Series ever feel like anything other than a coronation to begin the new age of men? The Cardinals were no more than the details of the party planning.

That’s right, thanks to the Sox, there have been plenty of parties to plan lately. It won’t be long, though, before we hunger for previews of next year.

Sam Pfeifle can be reached at spfeifle@phx.com