For most of the world, the transition from October 20th to October 21st, 2004 was quite uneventful. No so for those of us who proudly admit to being citizens of Red Sox Nation.

As one day was melding into the other, time and space retreated and gravitated to the fall of 1918. Specifically to the very joyous city of Boston, Massachusetts. We reveled in the celebration following the final game of that early Fall Classic and promptly charted our return trip back to the future, albeit via a new set of coordinates of space and time. Back to the headquarters of the Evil Empire. Back to the Bronx as the final minutes of October 20, 2004 were ticking away.

Several rather pleasing images caught our attention as we traveled our modified course home. An unexplored course woven through a virgin slice of the relatively newly proposed web of space-time!

Harry Frazee’s horse won the Irish Sweepstakes. He was not forced to sell the “Babe” to the Highlanders (recently renamed as the Yankees) in order to finance his Broadway production of “No, No Nanette”.

Pesky didn’t “hold the ball” in ’46 and easily gunned down the sliding Enos Slaughter at home.

The “Kid” riddled the Boudreau Shift in the one game AL playoff in ’48 and the Sox crushed the Indians. They went on to overwhelm the Boston Braves in the ‘48 World Series.

Elis Kinder shut out the Yankees on the last day of the ’49 regular season. The Brooklyn Dodgers were subsequently victimized in the Series by the unstoppable Williams and Co. juggernaut

The Impossible Dream of ’67 reached a crescendo in the bottom of the ninth of Game 7, as Yaz punctuated his MVP season by drilling a towering walk-off homer over the Monster off a shocked and distraught Bob Gibson of the Cardinals.

Larry Barnett had the guts to call interference on the Red Machine’s Ed Armbrister in Game 3 of that memorable ’75 Classic. The Sox prevailed in this game and there was no need for a Game 7. Fisk’s walk-off blast in Game 6 ended this most exciting battle and trumped Mazerowski’s dramatic ending of Game 7 in 1960 as the most exciting climax in World Series history.

Bill Buckner found the strength to bend his arthritic back an extra two inches, scooped up Mookie’s twisting roller and made an unassisted putout at first to entomb the '86 Mets.

Finally, the Einsteinian coordinates of our out and back time travels merged, just before the stroke of midnight, October 20, 2004, in the House that Gerhig built, as Pokey Reese scooped up Ruben Sierra’s feeble grounder and calmly flipped to Doug Mientkiewicz.

Game OVA - Thhhhhe RED SOX win! The triumph of good over evil is complete.

All is now right in this small corner of the world.

Ed O'Connell is a chemistry professor at both Fairfield and Yale University in Connecticut. He wrote this short essay while riding the train to work the day after the Red Sox beat the Yankees in the ALCS.