Yankees: Special Time and a Special Team

Suddenly at the corner of 72nd and Madison, about 1:30 in the afternoon, there was the wail of sirens and the sight of police motorcycles and police cars scattering traffic as they flew uptown. Then right behind the police came the first of the blue-and-white buses carrying the Atlanta Braves out of the city, out of the 1999 World Series, once and for all. One team gets the parade, the other gets a police escort to the airport on the day when it was supposed to be playing Game 5 of the Series.

Before long, the last of the three buses was gone, and all the flashing lights and racket with them. The Braves were gone. Maybe they were really gone from the time the Yankees scored four runs in the top of the eighth inning of Game 1.

The Braves led 1-0 that night and Greg Maddux was pitching brilliantly, if not as brilliantly as El Duque Hernandez. He needed three outs to get to John Rocker and couldn’t get them. Single from Scott Brosius. Walk to Darryl Strawberry. Maddux pitched around Strawberry the way he probably would have pitched around Babe Ruth. The Yankees had first and second, nobody out. It was clear now at Turner Field that the game would be decided right here, right now. This was the big moment of Game 1.

The Yankees grabbed it. They grabbed the lead in the Series. In Game 2, the moment for the Yankees came early, against Kevin Millwood. They knew if they jumped him and jumped the Braves, then they would go home to New York ahead two games to none. That is exactly the way they played it.

Everybody can see they have the manager, the talent, the pitching, the defense, the depth. And the money. But the quality that sets them apart is their feel for the game, their understanding of it, the instinct, from all of them, when that night’s game is really on the line.

“We all were MVP,” Mariano Rivera said early Thursday morning, after he had gotten the last outs of Game 4 as if he were pitching against Tampa Bay in July. “The whole thing: Manager, coaches, the 25 guys on the field.”

In the end, sports is really about moments. It is not just the runs you score, or the points, it is how you score them, and when you score them. In basketball, it doesn’t always have to be Allan Houston’s ball bouncing off everything except Pat Riley’s jaw and then finally falling through the basket. Sometimes it is a shot, or two, or three, even a good long run, in the middle of the third quarter.

It is the same in football, with the third down play you make in the middle of the drive, even the fourth-down play sometimes. And when the play is made we nod and say, that one is going to win them the game.

The Yankees are the best big-moment baseball team we will ever see. Joe Torre manages them that way, with his own feel for the game, with his own instincts. Mostly his team plays that way. You give them any kind of opening, the slightest opening, and the Yankees will not just kick down the door -- they will wipe out the whole neighborhood.

They dominate the late innings. It is not just because of Rivera, pitching right this minute like the greatest closer in baseball history. They get the hit. They make the play. They win the game. If there is a creed for this team, it was stated by Scott Brosius, in passing the other day.

“It doesn’t matter who gets it done,” he said. “It just matters that it gets done.”

The other night Reggie Jackson stood in the back of the press box and watched the Braves kick another ball around, and shook his head. Then he pointed at the Yankee dugout.

“You know what the greatest similarity is between this team and our team?” he asked. Jackson meant the Yankees of ’77 and ‘78, both World Series winners. “We never beat ourselves, ever. And neither do they.”

Chad Curtis won Game 3 with a 10th inning home run, but he had changed it a couple of hours before, when his fifth-inning home run changed the Braves’ lead from 5-1 to 5-2 against Tom Glavine. Suddenly the crowd was back in the game. Suddenly Game 3 didn’t feel as much like a sure thing.

Maybe even the Braves, who have been such failures at October’s most important moments, all throughout the ‘90s, felt the season slipping away, slipping away for good, right there. The Braves blow leads in October. The Yankees ignore them. The Yankees were not just better than the Braves, they were stronger, they had more athletic character. The Braves did not give the Series away. The Yankees took it.

There will be another parade today up the Canyon of Heroes, and then the season will be over. We will miss the season, these Yankees, more than ever. Because after today there are no moments from them until the spring. No more full houses at the Stadium, no more comebacks, no more Sinatra after the final out. No more of the feeling they spread around the city and everywhere people root for the Yankees. The feeling is simple enough:

They make us feel good.

Joe Torre’s Yankees play the game right and give us a good show and make us feel good not just about them, but caring about sports the way we do in the first place. We watch them play the way they did this October, in the Stadium, in front of another full house, and think: OK, this is how it is all supposed to look.

This is the way we are supposed to feel.