The year of the pitcher ended with a flurry of fastballs and splitters and sliders from the wispy frame of the San Francisco Giants’ Tim Lincecum. He did it with crisp efficiency, allowing a run and striking out 10 Texas Rangers over eight innings in Game 5 of the World Series.

Closer Brian Wilson finished off the championship just 2 hours 32 minutes after the first pitch, the quickest World Series game in 18 years, and it started a party Giants fans had craved since the team moved from New York in 1958. As the bubbly flowed in Arlington, Tex., the man who built the year’s triumphant pitcher could hardly contain his excitement.

Chris Lincecum, 63, stayed up all night at his home in Bellevue, Wash. He can do that whenever he wants now, in his first year of retirement after 42 years working at Boeing. But this was pure adrenaline. Chris’s youngest son, the one he calls his soul mate, had reached baseball’s summit.

“I never got to sleep,” Chris Lincecum said. “At 6 o’clock the next morning, I was still up. I remember every now and then, I’d be walking down the hall and just go, ‘Yeah!’ It really struck me: he just won the World Series. He won two of the four games. I’m still floating.”