You will remember the seventh inning, above all. You will laugh about it with your friends over beers, order another round, what the hell. You will still find it hard to believe, and will have to reassure yourself. You will remember the waves of emotions, the anger and the despair, and then that feeling. You know, the big one. That sound. The crack.

“When he started his swing I was real hopeful, because I knew he was going to hit it hard,” said pitcher R.A. Dickey. “And I was halfway on the carpet before the ball ever left the field.”

Yes, you will remember this.

Until that moment, it felt biblical. Game 5 of Toronto’s first baseball playoff series in 22 years, against the Texas Rangers, was tied 2-2, a tense game, a nerves game. With a man on third Jays catcher Russell Martin went to throw a ball back to the pitcher. Rangers right-fielder Shin Soo-Choo was stretching out his left arm straight across home plate, adjusting his elbow pad. The throw hit the bat. The man on third, Rougned Odor, came home.

“Never done that,” said Martin. “First time in my life.”

It stood as the winning run. You couldn’t decide a series on that play, could you? Imagine that. It was the right call, technically correct. But oh, Lord.

Chaos. Beers came cartwheeling out of the stands onto the field, or splashed into the crowds. One reportedly hit a baby, and another one whizzed by manager John Gibbons. A lot of Toronto fans should have been embarrassed, ejected and arrested. The boos thundered, and it was a maelstrom, mayhem, a meltdown, a mess. Some of us should have done better.

In the Jays dugout, Mark Buehrle was ejected. Outside, Toronto police were preparing in greater numbers than usual for any unrest. After an 18-minute delay it was still the seventh inning, and when the Jays got out of it that exhausted cheerful old theme song played, OK Blue Jays, that completed the descent into dystopian anarchical farce.

“It’s just a shame that that might be the difference-maker in a game of this magnitude,” said Gibbons. “Thank God it didn’t come down to being the deciding run.”

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And then.

And then . . .

“Like a novel that you don’t want to put down, you know?” said Dickey.

I mean, really. What do you say? In the bottom of the seventh Martin came to the plate, and he was desperate.

“I’m thinking, I better do something,” Martin said. “I need to get on base here. I better do something. I mean, I knew what I did.” He hit a dribbler, and ran. “I haven’t been down the line that hard (this year). I (thought), I’ve got to do something.”

The Rangers booted it. Then the next one. And the next, like the ball was a fish. Josh Donaldson blooped a ball that barely brushed the edge of Odor’s outstretched glove on the outer edge of the infield, because Odor misjudged it and backpedalled instead of turning to run. Suddenly the game was tied.

“I was pretty pissed at what I just did,” said Donaldson. “Based loaded, one out, and I get sawed off like that.”

Whatever it was — nerves, karma, the 29th-ranked fielding team in baseball — Bautista got his chance.

And with men at the corners and two outs and a 1-1 count and the building on its feet, Jose Bautista smashed a 97 mph Sam Dyson fastball 442 feet to left, a rocket, gone. He stood there, 34 years old, and he watched it go and looked at the pitcher and pursed his lips and flipped his bat aside like a king, like he would never need it again. They may erect a statue of that bat flip. It was the biggest home run in this building in 22 years, and you will tell your friends about it, and you will laugh in disbelief, years from now. Holy bleep, you’ll say. The sound was a crack, whole and pure, and then the raucous end of the world.

“I’ve never seen a stadium so alive,” said Martin. “Ever. I can’t describe it. I can definitely remember it. I can still see it. One of the greatest moments of my life.”

“I can’t really remember what was going though my mind, to be quite honest with you,” said Bautista. “After I made contact, I just, you know — I didn’t plan anything I did. And so I still don’t know how I did it.”

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“The game of baseball, if you try to figure it out, you’ll drive yourself crazy,” said Donaldson, soaked in champagne, his blue eyes a little spacey. “I mean, you look at what happened, there are a lot of crazy people out there.” Of Bautista, he said. “The guy’s amazing. He’s my hero . . . I want to hug him forever.”

Three of the four seventh-inning runs were unearned, unless you were speaking cosmically. The benches cleared twice more after Bautista’s bat flip, and the Rangers will remember this, too. The inning took nearly an hour.

“I’ve never seen anything like that whole inning,” said Dickey. “Nineteen years of playing. I was talking to the guys on the bench. Even Buehrle said he’d never seen anything like that. That’s like 40 years of experience between us. That’s something else.”

There was more. They had needed so much to get to that point, to that moment. Two wins in elimination games in Texas. A string of marvellous defensive plays, all game — Martin throwing out Elvis Andrus at third, Kevin Pillar leaving a burn mark on the field on a diving catch in the fourth, Donaldson bare-handing a ball at top speed. The pitching, from young men. Edwin Encarnacion, the other half of the longtime power duo in the middle of this lineup, the shy one of the two proud Dominican men, who smashed a home run 457 feet to left in the sixth inning to tie the game, 2-2. That one was important, too.

“We’ve been waiting a long time,” said Encarnacion. “And we’re here. Me and Jose enjoyed this moment. We’ve never seen anything like this.”

But the seventh inning is what you will remember. When the game ended general manager Alex Anthopoulos and his men sprayed water bottles everywhere, and then he sped out towards the hallway and his wife Cristina appeared in the doorway and she screamed, just screamed, and they collided in an embrace, and his two toddling children pulled their father down as their mother screamed again.

“That was just insane,” said Anthopoulos. “I’m glad we won.”

In the clubhouse, the Jays sprayed the champagne again and lit the cigars again and begged Munenori Kawasaki to speak again, and will play to go to the World Series. This doesn’t happen in Toronto anymore, but it’s happening. Hell of a team, these guys.

“This team, I can’t put it into words,” said starter Marcus Stroman.

“I’m just thrilled to be a part of this team,” said Donaldson. “It’s just been an amazing ride.”

“We’re not finished,” said Bautista. “That’s right.”

You will remember this. They will, too.

How the Jays won the ALDS

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