The final pitch of the World Series, a fastball down the middle from Sergio Romo that Miguel Cabrera took for strike three, is being held up as the ultimate and complete encapsulation of everything you need to know about the 2012 San Francisco Giants. Gutsy, arrogant, unexpected -- one pitch from a short, skinny dude to the most powerful hitter in baseball epitomized a team that didn't know its place. You could hear it everywhere, from your living room to the tone in Joe Buck's voice: He got away with one there.

Sergio Romo's final pitch worked because it was a smart call. Leon Halip/Getty Images

That seems to be the overriding message of the world champion Giants: They got away with one there. They got away with one by winning three straight in Cincinnati, and they got away with one by winning three straight against the Cardinals, and they got away with one by catching the Tigers in some sort of mental and physical pre-hibernation sloth, as if all those big bodies sensed a seasonal change and just needed to lie down for a minute.

So nice of Romo to provide such a handy and symbolic means of telling the whole story in one 89 mph fastball. It tells the story of baseball's most unlikely mini-dynasty of the past 50 years (at least), and it tells it in the most extreme way possible: The most physically unimposing player on either roster staring down the biggest and baddest hitter on the planet and freezing him solid with a challenge fastball that practically cackled on its way to the plate.

But the lesson to be learned is not the one people are intent on teaching. Any attempts to paint Romo's pitch -- and, by extension, the Giants' run to the title -- as luck or trickery or some other form of the black arts is to miss the point, which is this: The Giants were better, and they were better because they were smarter.

The prevailing storyline -- the Giants as quirky underdogs whose run to the title made no sense -- was turned on its head in the World Series. Everything about it, down to the last pitch, made perfect sense.

If Romo is a symbol of anything, and if the Giants are a symbol of anything, it's that baseball is as much brains as brawn. Romo didn't get lucky with a gutsy pitch. That pitch, in that situation, was unhittable. Romo set Cabrera up with five sliders -- a pitch that rivals Mariano Rivera's cutter as a singular weapon -- and then threw the one pitch that Cabrera had no chance of hitting.