America has had two great male marathoners in the past decade. One is a blond man from the California mountains with an apple-pie name, Ryan Hall. No one in this country has run 26.2 miles faster. But Hall switched trainers a few years ago—leaving behind men of the flesh, declaring that he would rely on God instead—and he’s been injured more or less ever since. God tested Job by letting Satan give him boils all over his body. He’s testing Hall with plantar fasciitis. The New York City Marathon, which takes place this Sunday, was supposed to be Hall’s triumphant return. He dropped out two weeks ago.

The second marathoner is a refugee from Eritrea named Mebrahtom Keflezighi, who’s lived in the U.S. since he was twelve. He’s not as fast as Hall—his best time is 2:09:08, compared to Hall’s 2:04:58—but he’s better. Élite marathoners come in two forms: those who race the clock and those who race to win. Hall likes flat, fast courses, and he likes to run by himself, even when it means giving up a chance to come in first. Keflezighi is around the lead pack; he takes risks and enters races with lots of curves and hills that slow you down. He’s the kind of guy who likes to run New York, with its brutal bridges and preposterous start up the Verrazano, and win.

O.K., about those beards—I give up. The Red Sox took this World Series in six games, but by something wider in retrospect. The Cardinals, ahead two games to one in the early going, led only once after that—a little 1-0 margin that held up for two innings in Game Four. In actuality, they outhit the Sox, .224 to .211, but did not draw sustenance from this gruel, because of a collective batting debility. The bottom four hitters in their order failed to deliver a single base runner in scoring position over the seven games. Their dugout was tomblike last night after Shane Victorino’s three-run double, high off the wall in the third inning, and no wonder. The eight Boston batters not named Ortiz, by contrast, stayed upbeat throughout—a boys’ club, you felt—despite a similar collective fatuity at the plate. Somebody or other would provide: Gomes with a three-run homer in Game Four; David Ross with a seventh-inning double the next night; that Victorino double yesterday. All this can be blamed on St. Louis pitching, of course, but there was clearly something else in play during these games—a winning conviction beyond the reach of stats. Beards did it.

After the Red Sox closer Koji Uehara struck out the Cardinals second baseman Matt Carpenter, with a final delightful, darting splitter, bringing the 2013 World Series to a close in Boston’s favor, Fox and the assembled media cohort hurried in to paint what was already a manifestly important moment—see those guys jumping up and down there on the infield?—with a veneer of historical context. “It hasn’t happened at Fenway Park in ninety-five years: the Red Sox are world champions,” Joe Buck announced as the team mobbed the field. The thinking goes among broadcasters and writers, it seems, that sports fans need some reassurance that their immediate happiness means something in the larger panorama of human history. The players, knowing other things about sports, often blink at these questions from reporters, but they play along. But, as with all instant big-picture punditry, some of these so-called narratives are true and some are mostly hogwash.

Given a Red Sox victory, tonight’s Game Six of the World Series will be the last for Tim McCarver, the veteran Fox commentator; if they lose to the Cardinals, he’ll be back tomorrow for the finale. Just turned seventy-two, he’s retiring in full form and will be grievously missed. He’s not tottering away—he’s passionately into winemaking, for one thing—and he has looked splendid in the current closeups, next to his partner Joe Buck, with his hair at last permitted to show its natural and distinguished gray-white. McCarver and Buck are, for me and countless others, the primo pair in sports broadcasting, with their only possible rivals being Buck and Troy Aikman covering the N.F.L. for Fox on Sundays. With McCarver there, the pairing often feels more like a trio, because Tim’s intense, intelligent, deeply informed, excitable, verbose, folksy, intellectual, opinionated, and morally fervid participation in the events on the field inexorably takes hold of you, the listener, and pushes you into the adjoining seat, where you can almost feel McCarver’s jostling elbow and feel on your arm and elbow the heat of his eagerness for what’s coming next. True, there may come little stretches of time when you really want to have Tim shaddup and sit back, but then, almost with the next pitch, comes the paired sneaky wish to catch him out in something overstretched or teen-age sentient—this week, with his “As leaves change in New England, so does the score”—and later, of course, just up the line, there’s the awaited reverse: something defining and delighting, as when Boston reliever Craig Breslow’s throw to third base went wild into left field, in Game Two, allowing two Cardinal base runners to sprint home. “We talk from April to October,” Tim said, “about how many games are lost by pitchers’ throws to bases. A lot.”

After Mariano Rivera, unarguably the greatest closer in baseball history, announced in March that this season would be his last, a fanfare accompanied his arrival at every stadium—a season-long celebration of Rivera’s retirement. It would be correct to say that I also retired from baseball, but it seems pretentious and unmerited; I quit. I was only twenty-four, healthy and strong, and earning lots of money as a Chicago Cubs rookie pinch hitter, with a decent chance of becoming an everyday starter.

When I was eighteen, in 2006, I decided to bypass my college offers and play baseball professionally. I had narrowed my choices to Stanford and Florida, but the Philadelphia Phillies selected me in the first round of the draft—and gave me nearly a million dollars to join their organization and start working my way to the majors. I spent six years playing minor-league ball in Florida, Texas, California, New Jersey, and Iowa. I was picked for the All-Star Futures Game, which showcases the best minor leaguers; one year I was even rated as the best second baseman in the minor leagues.

Boston wins, 3-1, Lester tops Wainwright once again, and the Sox head home ahead by a game, with a chance to wrap up baseball for the year in Wednesday night’s Game Six. That’s the short line, in an account perhaps shrivelled by the welcome tautness and economy of last night’s pitching duel, in a game without errors (the teams had together committed eleven in prior play) or base-path melodrama, that got itself over with in a brisk two hours and fifty-two minutes. Big Papi continued to astound, with a run-scoring double on his first pitch of the evening, two singles, and a line-drive out. He is batting .733 for the series—as against a cumulative .151 for the rest of the Boston hitters—and now sometimes gives the impression that he is stopping by to play in these little entertainments, in the manner of a dad joining his daughter’s fifth-grade softball game. When he came up to bat once again in the sixth, Cardinals’ starter Adam Wainwright essayed some uncharacteristic little pauses and stutter steps on the mound, trying to throw off that implacable swing. It was like trying to disconcert winter.

Last night’s game, like Saturday’s, ended with a losing-team player disconsolate in the dirt, but this time without an attached ruling to talk about. Kolten Wong, a ninth-inning Cardinals pinch base runner, was cleanly picked off first base by the Boston closer Koji Uehara, for the last out of the game. No excuse: Sox win, 4–2, knotting the series at two games apiece. The play was a fillip, not a filibuster, with the evening’s main event remaining Jonny Gomes’s three-run homer in the top of the sixth, which broke a 1–1 tie, and held up, guaranteeing that the teams, no matter who wins tonight, will return to Boston on Wednesday, for a sixth and then possibly a seventh and determining contest. Serious stuff by then, with every pitch tense and fraught, and winter now just down the street. No more fun, I mean, so let’s pause here and for one last time talk about beards.

On Saturday night, Showtime let Bernard Hopkins introduce himself by means of a promotional video. “I’ve shown for twenty-plus years, with a legacy that will be talked about way after I’m gone, that I am different,” he said. Then the broadcast moved to Boardwalk Hall, in Atlantic City, where Hopkins walked through the crowd to the boxing ring. To show how different he is, he adopted a new nickname for Saturday’s fight: The Alien. He used to call himself The Executioner, and often came to fights wearing a menacing balaclava. But this time, he emerged wearing a lime-green alien mask; his trainer, Naazim Richardson, wore a lime-green skullcap.

The Red Sox, who had fallen behind the Cardinals in the first inning and again in the seventh, could have lost the third game of the World Series in routine fashion, but managed to do it spectacularly and historically, on a play and a call, in the ninth inning, not previously matched in the game. The rest of the action can thus be folded into summary—feeble but also staunch work by the veteran Sox starter Jake Peavy, who gave up four hits and two runs in the first inning, and pitched out of something worse, then escaped a further pickle, in the fourth, when he loaded the bases with no outs but wiggled free. The Bosox, who never led, came back two times from two-run deficits to tie things up, and there were breathtaking infield plays along the way: by the Cards’ second baseman, Matt Carpenter, and then his substitute, the rookie Kolten Wong; and once again by the Sox’ Dustin Pedroia. The pitching wasn’t up to previous levels—there were twelve hits by the Cards and blown saves by two Cardinal relievers, including by the eventual winner, Trevor Rosenthal. A line-drive double in the bottom of the ninth, whacked by pinch hitter Allen Craig on the first pitch from the previously impregnable Sox closer Koji Uehara, set up the last scene of the opera.

Suspend my passport if you like: this once loyal citizen of Red Sox Nation hadn’t watched an inning all season, until Wednesday night. I kept hearing, of course, that they were an interesting and likeable bunch, in contrast with their recent predecessors. No more Bobby V. (though I somewhat enjoyed him, in the rubbernecking sense). No more Beckett. No more Youkilis. (I know this may be blasphemous, but the Greek God of Walks had long since stopped embodying discretion at the plate, and his beards were all menace, with none of the chuckle that his dainty batting stance might recommend—they lacked the klezmer charm of the current lot.) Even John Lackey, I gathered, had become a redemptive figure, absolved of the chicken and biscuits, and the double-fisted Bud Lights.