BOSTON – The high-five turned 36 years old earlier this month, and it has not aged well. Whereas the high-five used to be the preferred celebratory gesture of athletes and cool people everywhere, it has lost market share to fist bumps, intricate handshakes, hugs and, most alarming, backhanded fives, or fours, as they should be called, since the thumbs do not touch.

What made the high-five so ubiquitous was its seeming ease and effect; slapping hands with another person takes minimal effort to create maximum noise, a tactile and auditory bonanza. Of course, because everybody could execute a high-five with relative ease, its popularity swelled to the fad tipping point. When nerds embraced the high-five, it lost its cachet and was doomed to the pocket-protector pile.

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Forgive the high-five, then, for doing its own little celebration these days. The high-five is cool again, especially in Boston, where the most valuable player of the American League Championship Series this season rescued it from the geek graveyard.

Koji Uehara, 38, from Japan, is not the likeliest of trendsetters. He communicates with his Boston Red Sox teammates in decent-enough English, but not enough to announce his intentions of his revive-the-five movement. Which, to tell the truth, wasn't a movement so much as a bit of spontaneity that spawned a tradition. Which, in baseball, dare not meet its end so long as it punctuates something good. And considering the Red Sox are one day away from opening the World Series at Fenway Park against the St. Louis Cardinals, and Uehara is riding a 90-mph fastball and disappearing split-fingered fastball to one of the great all-time runs for a closer, this is good like a $4.5 million lottery ticket is good.

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Uehara wasn't exactly a Powerball slip for the Red Sox this offseason when he signed for that sum. In his four seasons since arriving from Japan, Uehara had some of the best control the major leagues ever had seen, walking just 29 batters in 211 2/3 innings while striking out 231. Boston penciled him in for a middle-relief role, only to see closer Joel Hanrahan blow out his elbow and replacement Andrew Bailey land on the disabled list, too. In came Uehara, whose reputation for high-stakes high-fives after strong innings grew as he punctuated saves with them.

"I can't really explain why I don't do a hug or a fist bump," Uehara said through translator C.J. Matsumoto. "It's something that came up naturally."

Others around the Red Sox suspect there are physiological reasons behind Uehara's high-fives. Yale-educated reliever Craig Breslow considers Uehara's "long, strong fingers" to make his high-fives especially potent, and outfielder Daniel Nava, a frequent recipient of postgame high-fives, extrapolates the phalange theory out to Uehara's bread-and-butter pitch.

"When you throw a splitter like he does, you need to have very good finger control and dexterity," Nava said. "I would say it's supreme dexterity in the fingers. So imagine giving him a high-five. It's all in the hand control. He hits the spot of the hand perfectly. And you just want to come back for more. It's like an Oreo when you open it up. You just don't know which side to get, and you want to come back for more."

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