We got eight rounds. We want the full fifteen.

Buster Olney probably thieved the internet with this tweet shortly after the Athletics' heartbreaking 8-6 loss to the Tigers in game 4 of the ALDS:

Feels like Verlander-Gray, if it happened, would be like Hagler-Hearns II, in a baseball kind of way. — Buster Olney (@Buster_ESPN) October 9, 2013

It is very rare in baseball as in any form of entertainment for something to fully deliver. Super Bowl match-ups which dominate national broadcasts for hundreds and hundreds

of talking-head hours fizzle out by the time we come back to that dang cartoon gecko once again with his hilarious antics.

This baseball series--this one that we are all watching, and riding up and down like a surfer gripping to waves in the gender-neutralizingly cold Bay Area waters--this is the definition of a timelessly classic BASEBALL series.

The game is dying. The sky is falling. Football has taken the luster and the attention away. The game is dying and no cares.

Except the game isn't dying.

Baseball is alive, kicking, and breaking/remaking hearts like no other. And I hear more people like you and me agonizing than ever before, personally twisting like an injury-prone ankle in our seats on the bus, at home, and at school. Ask a Braves fan right now what they're feeling. In contrast, get a nice heat rush off the beaming faces of Los Angeles Dodgers fans as they stare their first League Championship Series in four years down.

Which is why, without a shadow of doubt, Sonny Gray should get the ball against a tuned-up cyborg extraordinaire Justin Verlander on Thursday.

Because it's right. Because baseball is entertainment of the highest emotional order. Because the punches each landed in one of the best pitcher's duels of the modern era back on Saturday didn't leave either corner ready to toss in the towel.

Because Bartolo Colon is a great story, but he doesn't embody/encompass the reasons to love this game and this time and this series and this dichotomy. Sonny Gray is everything that we need out of an unknown conquering hero, with the stuff/nerve to back it up.

Sonny Gray, other than maybe the first four innings of Dan Straily's game 4 start, is the only A's starting pitcher this postseason to flash the internal armor necessary to go toe to toe with the heralded-on-high best starting rotation on the planet.

Colon may be the safer, smarter choice. When on, there is no pitcher who seems to turn bats into floopy wet baguettes than Bartolo Colon and his all-the-body-goes-crashing-into-the-strike-zone control. Bartolo has shown an unflappable nature through the personal and the sportive, making him a perfect intellectual choice to take the ball.

But, baseball, for all of its metrics and WARs and WHIPs and ratios and number-crunching, isn't a purely intellectual game.

It is also a familial form of high-entertainment that captivates and engrosses lives in such a way that sometimes it requires the big, skronking, cymbal-crashing and horn-blaring cacophony of a finish.

A series this close, where the A's have outscored the Tigers by a solitary run, and instantly obsessively YouTube repeat looping moments in time have been the rule and not the exception--a series like this deserves the 23-year-old boy-faced Tennessean getting his championship round experience in against one of the best postseason (and in general) pitchers of our time.

Sonny Gray versus Justin Verlander is the only finish worth having, whether the A's advance to the ALCS for the first time in seven years or not. It encapsulates the struggles and renaissance of the Oakland Athletics as a franchise and as a concept. There is no big-money pitcher waiting in the wings ready to program his way to a dominant, dream-killing performance. There is just heart and a bloody chance.

Bartolo, we appreciate what you've done. We forgive and forgave you, and we need you if and when this doesn't work.

But, it's time for everyone to get what baseball needs and deserves.

Endings this grand don't write themselves as perfectly as this one is being penned for this amazing series.

Let's make the drama overflow, and watch what happens in its wake.