The fortunate part was that there really was a second act for Bill Buckner, one that came so many years after the moment that would unfairly underline his brilliant baseball career, the instant a baseball drizzled between his ruined legs early one Sunday morning in October 1986.

Athletes react in different ways when the fates conspire against them, especially at the most inopportune times. Earlier in that autumn, Buckner’s teammate, Dave Henderson, had crushed a Donnie Moore pitch over a wall in Anaheim, Calif., to improbably keep the Red Sox alive in the ALCS. Moore never recovered from that. He killed himself three years later after first trying to murder his wife.

Then there was Ralph Branca, who surrendered the most famous home run in baseball history, the Shot Heard Round the World that won the 1951 playoff for the Giants over Branca’s Dodgers. While Bobby Thomson, the man who hit that blast, would always gently chide, “Ask Ralph how many of the speaking fees he’s given back over the years,” he also knew precisely the burden Branca bore the final 65 years of his life.

“For me,” Thomson told me in 2001, “that moment was the best thing that ever happened to me. It may have been the best thing that ever happened to anybody. It was Ralph that allowed people to enjoy it, though. His grace. His good humor.”

It took awhile for life to get square with Buckner, who hit .289 in 22 major league seasons, who played in four different decades, who assembled 2,715 hits and won the 1980 NL batting crown with the Cubs, who had 721 extra-base hits and struck out only 453 times in his career. Only Pete Rose had more hits in the ’70s and ’80s. The only other player since 1961 to have a lower strikeout rate in a career of 10,000-plus at-bats? Tony Gwynn.

Buckner died at age 69 Monday after a long bout with Lewy Body Dementia, his family said in a statement. It was an extraordinary baseball life, with exactly one exception.

That was a few minutes after the Saturday evening of Oct. 25, 1986 bled into the Sunday morning of Oct. 26. It should be essential to note, on all retellings of this story, that the Red Sox had already blown the two-run lead they took into the bottom of the 10th inning, the last when a Mets outfielder named Mookie Wilson somehow skipped out of the way of a Bob Stanley sinker, allowing the tying run to score from third. That made the game 5-5.

But then Wilson hit a slow roller behind first base. The other footnote that should forever be attached to this: Buckner had no business being at first in the bottom of the 10th. All season, he’d been replaced late in games by Dave Stapleton, and he was playing that whole postseason on damaged knees and ankles. But he was out there. That’s a fact.

So is this: the ball skipped under his glove, bisected his legs. Ray Knight scored the winning run. Two nights later the Mets won Game 7, extending to 68 years a Sox drought that wouldn’t die until it turned 86.

Buckner was chased out of Boston. He came back to Fenway for a Sox encore, to cheers, in 1990, briefly, but after he retired he had to seek asylum in Idaho to forsake the maddening crowd. He spoke later of a constant bitterness that filled him. Twenty-two years of elegant baseball service, reduced to 22 seconds, the worst 22 seconds of his career.

“I was saddened to hear about Bill’s death,” Wilson said in a statement released through Mets Alumni VP Jay Horwitz. “We had developed a friendship that lasted well over 30 years. I felt badly for some of the things he went through. Bill was a great, great baseball player whose legacy should not be defined by one play.”

It was that friendship that helped make things right. Together, Wilson and Buckner would make appearances, signing posters of the play (one of which clearly shows that Mookie would have been safe because Stanley never bothered to rush to cover first). They made a memorable appearance on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”

And on Opening Day 2008, Buckner returned to Fenway Park to help celebrate the 2007 championship Sox by throwing out the first pitch. He walked slowly from left field to the pitcher’s mound, and the fans at Fenway paved his path with a thunderous ovation that only grew louder as he paused to wipe away a tear and then throw a strike to Dewey Evans. To the very end he was unsure if he should do it. The cheers told him he’d done right.

“Glad I did it,” he said after. “Glad I came.”

Bobby Valentine was Ralph Branca’s son-in-law and he was also friends with Buckner for 51 years, both of them members of the Dodgers’ historic 1968 draft class. They grew up together in baseball.

“As I clear my head and hold back the tears I know I will always remember Billy Buck as a great hitter and a better friend,” Valentine tweeted Monday. “He deserved better.”

It took too many years, but baseball finally did right by him. History ought to do the same.