This World Series, like many before it, has produced exclamations of wonder and appreciation from friends and acquaintances of mine who pay little attention to baseball during the season and once again rediscover its satisfactions and swift surprises in October, almost by accident. “Hey,” they say in the lobby or over the phone. “That was something! That was different, wasn’t it? This is so great.”

I smile and agree with them and try never to say, “What was wrong with September? Where were you in July?” But today I am stunned and at one with them. This was absolutely different. The astounding 13–12 win by the home-team Astros over the Dodgers on Sunday night before a screaming crowd was unique in ways that we can hardly count.

But let’s just count a few. This was the first Series game in history in which three different batters—the Dodgers’ Cody Bellinger and the Astros’ Yulieski Gurriel and José Altuve—each hit a three-run home run. There were seven homers in all: two by the visiting Dodgers, five by the Astros. Fourteen pitchers were called on, and each team had fourteen hits. And, at five hours and seventeen minutes, this was the second-longest World Series game ever.

These are two powerful teams that accumulated more than a hundred wins each in the season, but this armored-brigade kind of scoring, a rush of runs in a very short space, is a specialty of the Astros, who had given us an earlier sample back in Game 2, in L.A., when, after tying the game, 3–3, in the ninth, they produced back-to-back home runs by Altuve and Carlos Correa, in the top of the tenth, and, after the Dodgers had re-tied it, went ahead for good on George Springer’s two-run dinger in the eleventh. The Dodgers, for their part, had produced solo homers in the tenth and the eleventh, but fell short by a run. As I keep saying, these very high numbers, these floods of runs, add up to something brand-new—tax-accountant baseball.

Like other New York homies, I had adopted a sulky indifference when our young wild-card Yanks failed by one game in the League Championships, and only lately have I given full notice to this thrilling Astros bunch, not just the compact powerhouse Altuve but those surrounding him in the upper end of the lineup—the leadoff center-fielder Springer, the tall and beautifully athletic shortstop Correa, and the third baseman Alex Bregman, my M.V.P. to date, whose clenched-jaw at-bats and key hits—his single scored the winning run on Sunday night—were matched only by his brilliant defensive plays at his corner. Not in the stats but also sweetly notable was the Astros’ affection for one another and their boyish excitement over what they were watching and again making happen.

There have been a couple of quieter, more familiar evenings—starting with the Dodgers’ 3–1 win behind Clayton Kershaw in the opener, accomplished in a merciful two hours and twenty-eight minutes. Saturday’s Dodger win, which brought them even in the Series, was almost of the same order, a brisk 1–1 tie through eight, abruptly altered by five crushing Dodger runs in the ninth.

There have been plenty of victimized pitchers to be sorry for amid these eruptions, including Kershaw, who blew a 4–0 lead in the fourth inning on Sunday night, on a double and then Gurriel’s three-run homer. I felt even worse about the Dodgers’ Brandon Morrow, who had worked an inning and a third the night before and a little less on Friday. His manager, Dave Roberts, announced beforehand that Morrow would absolutely not be available on this night, but the surging Astro offense changed all that. Coming on at the bottom of the seventh, Morrow gave up a home run, a single, a double, and another home run in six pitches—probably another first-ever, if I had the heart to look it up.

This has been a hard October for managers, a stretch in which the Mets and the Red Sox, the Nationals and the Yankees have all dismissed their incumbent skippers. Joe Girardi’s canning, after a season in which he brought his youthful, low-expectations club to the edge of the World Series, was a shock to him and to every Yankee fan. His highly professional and serious work ethic brought a World Championship to the Bronx in 2009, in his second year at the helm, but this quiet control style of management was always a trifle removed, as suited his personality. We will have a chance to remember him and think about all this some more after the Series is over, when the new and presumably chummier Yankee manager will be named and produced at a Stadium press conference.

I have also come to pity the admirable World Series managers, Dave Roberts and A. J. Hinch, who have seen so many of their starters and relievers crash and fade, and have had to call upon the lonely surviving guys in the bullpen to come in and please for God’s sake get a few outs.

Series managers also come to expect the unexpected, in Hinch’s case the ugly racial posturings by Astro first baseman Gurriel, directed at the defeated Dodgers’ starter, Yu Darvish. This went viral and of course reached Commissioner Rob Manfred, who after consultations eventually ruled that Gurriel will be suspended for the first five games of next year’s season.

Still on managers, my thoughts about Dave Roberts go back to the beginning of Sunday night’s game, when he had his ace Kershaw on the mound, and the better part of a bullpen that had yielded no runs at all through the first two rounds of the playoffs. Now all that is in tatters, and he must find a way for his club somehow to beat the great Justin Verlander tonight in order to survive, and, if it does, someone else the night after. Who said any of this was going to be fun?