So much for managerial genius winning the World Series.

The team whose manager almost lost the whole thing by bunting with the curse-ending run at third and one out in the eighth and then sent out his closer who had just nearly blown the Series to pitch another inning with almost nothing left but hanging sliders, beat the team whose manager intentionally walked two men in the series-losing extra inning and then was stuck with nobody left to pinch-hit for the 25th man on his roster with the tying-it-again run on first base in the final at bat.

Even the off-the-field highlight, the win-one-for-the-Gipper speech that is supposed to exist deep in the soul of every coach or manager in every sport, waiting to be summoned in that final moment of tension, came not from managers Joe Maddon or Terry Francona, but from a player—and, of all people, outfielder Jason Heyward, who spent most of the first year of a $184,000,000 contract providing almost nothing but defense and a little inspiration. It was he—not Maddon, not the as-of-now-retired catcher David Ross, not some Billy Goat, not some ethereal Harry Caray or Ernie Banks—who called the Cubs to a players-only meeting during the 10th-inning rain delay that may have been the most fortuitous weather interruption in the history of the sport.

Immediately after, the Cubs went from the longest championship drought in the known sporting world to the shortest one. Heyward said his meeting speech was simple: “I just had to remind them who they were. I just had to remind everybody who we are.”

And inside that seeming athlete nonsense gobbledygook was unexpected truth. As much as the managers influenced some of the early games, they didn’t so much blunder in the latter ones as get swept aside by the reality that the longer a baseball series goes, the more likely it is that miracles will vanish and pure on-field talent will prevail. And the Cubs were not only the most talent-laden team in the sport all the season, but in Cleveland they met an opponent decimated by key injuries and held together through Game 5 largely by the string-and-juice-can machinations of Francona.

The veteran Cleveland manager—who with Chicago’s president, Theo Epstein, had contrived more than a decade ago to break another epic eons-long World Series drought in Boston—may take heat for the undeniable fact that Cleveland was up, three games to one, leading the potentially decisive game 1-0 as the bottom of the fourth inning began, and would not only lose that game and the next two, but never as much as again hold a lead as their dreams of ending their own Series curse slowly turned into a nightmare.

If there is blame, Francona doesn’t deserve much of it. His outside-the-box use of relief pitching, especially of Andrew Miller, was largely responsible for Cleveland winning three of the first four games. He went to the ostensible late-inning buzz-killer in the seventh inning of the first game, the fifth inning of the third game, and again in the seventh of the fourth game. And the awakening of the Cubs in that fateful fourth inning of the fifth game did not afford Francona another chance to use Miller as relief talisman until Cleveland was down 4-1 in the top of the fifth of the finale. Like all the game’s great skippers, he also threw out old and unusable strategy. Francona put Boston in the 2007 World Series by refusing to start a pitcher in the penultimate round on three days’ rest instead of four. This year he nearly brought Cleveland a title by doing the opposite: by starting all his pitchers on three days’ rest.