TORONTO—Everybody knows that the fifth game of the ALDS, between the Toronto Blue Jays and the Texas Rangers, was an instant classic. After the high of the victory has worn off and historical perspective has emerged, it may well rank as one of the best games ever played in Canada. The seventh inning was easily one of the all-time greatest innings of baseball, a small dramatic jewel within a masterpiece. And in that inning came one of the most badass baseball gestures ever: Jose Bautista's bat flip, an image that will fill a million Canadian kids' rooms from now on.

Sam Dyson, the pitcher who gave up this homer, took exception to it, as so many pitchers do to bat flips. "Jose needs to calm that down, just kind of respect the game a little more," Dyson said. "He's a huge role model for the younger generation that's coming up playing this game, and I mean he's doing stuff that kids do in wiffle ball games and backyard baseball. It shouldn't be done." Frankly, this is insane. It is the opinion of someone who clearly has failed to recognize what he was involved with. Bautista's long shot was not some ordinary home run in a regular-season game. It was the biggest home run of a great hitter's entire career at a moment full of a tension so profound it afflicted an entire country.

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For reasons that are unique to the Toronto Blue Jays of 2015, the seventh inning was different from anything the team has ever known, even the playoff runs of 1992 and 1993. In '92 and '93, the Montreal Expos were still around. The Blue Jays were not truly a national team. Now they are. To have people in Montreal cheering for a Toronto team is, in and of itself, extraordinary. But Canadians are flying into the city from the Northwest territories to watch these games. It's national mania. That context is what lifted the seventh inning out of the ordinary course of sports into something altogether stranger and more powerful.

The inning took 53 minutes. It possessed everything baseball has to offer, the full range of emotions that the game can produce compressed into six outs. The bizarre incident in which Russell Martin threw the ball from behind home plate to the pitcher and hit the batter created a supremely dark mood in the whole of Toronto. It took 18 minutes for the umpires to confirm the ruling, and, when they did, the crowd of nearly 50,000 started looking downright dangerous. A man this morning has been charged with public mischief after throwing beer that landed on a woman cradling a baby in the stands below.

Canadians are, generally speaking, a quiet bunch, but sports brings out the worst in them. The majority of the biggest riots in Canadian history started after hockey games. It was not inconceivable that the city would burn. If you think I'm exaggerating, look at what happened to Vancouver after the Canucks lost the Stanley Cup. The Jays had to come out of the dugout to try to calm the fans down, and they were not successful.

Down by one run, the bottom of the Jays' order stepped up. What happened next will haunt the Texas players forever, no doubt. They committed three errors in a row. Josh Donaldson would later claim that he had never seen such a collapse. With the bases loaded, Donaldson's looper kissed the glove of Odor for the tying run. Then Bautista, who has been in Toronto for eight years without making the postseason, stepped up and hit the home run that will ensure that his name goes on the wall of the building and that he'll be given a key to the city. He followed it with the bat flip. How could he not? In all honesty, what ethical system exists that would deny a man his honor because of a slight physical reaction that harms no one?

My hope is that this is the turning point for the bat flip generally, that it now becomes an acceptable part of major league baseball as it is in Japan and Korea and the Caribbean and everywhere else the game is played. The display of emotion in a baseball game should not be taken as some kind of violation of WASP proprieties but an organic human reaction to the joy of making beauty. To say that Bautista was disrespecting the pitcher is absurd. The moment was so huge and the game was so huge and emotions within that moment were so huge that it would have been inhuman not to react. A whole country, a whole city, riled up to the point of near riot, relieved by a single act of heroism. If you can't celebrate that, what the hell are you ever going to celebrate?

Stephen Marche Stephen Marche is a novelist who writes a monthly column for Esquire magazine about culture.

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