Subscribe | UPI Odd Newsletter Subscribe WASHINGTON, Nov. 2 (UPI) -- Even if the season had been normal, the back-to-back, come-from-behind, last minute victories of New York Yankees against the Arizona Diamondbacks in Games Four and Five of the 2001 World Series would have been the stuff of legend. Those games embodied the kind of pure sporting melodrama that those who witness them remember and treasure for decades, even generations, to come. Advertisement But the season had not been normal. It had seen less than two months before one of the greatest catastrophes in the entire history of New York City -- the destruction of the World Trade Towers, the two highest buildings in the city and two of the highest in the world, by terrorists using hijacked airliners. Between 3,000 and 5,000 New Yorkers died in the carnage, approximately between two and three the total death tolls on the doomed luxury liner Titanic almost 90 years earlier. Advertisement The heroism of New Yorkers, especially its fire, emergency service and police officers, in that hellish inferno had defied belief and inspired a stunned and grieving nation. The resilience, humanity and even unity of New Yorkers in the weeks that followed the catastrophe had defied precedent and expectation too. And, somehow, the never-say-die spirit of these aging and supposedly fading Yankees caught the symbolism of all that. Americans do not take gallant losers to their heart the way the English do. And usually they acclaim overwhelming winners, not those who just scrape home against all odds. But they do love fighters. Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, two of the greatest heavyweight division boxing champions of all time, are still revered and loved by Americans not just because of their courage and athletic excellence but because their classic confrontations with each other were such evenly matched, hard-fought duels on both sides. Great heroes triumph, in American tradition as in Greek myth, only when they have opponents and challenges truly worthy of them. The Yankees in their struggles with the Oakland As and Seattle Mariners, and most of all in their extraordinary World Series clashes with the Diamondbacks had opponents worthy of them. But they also exemplified the spirit of New York, a city now loved and appreciated by Americans across their vast nation as, arguably, it has never been before. Advertisement The aging dynasts of the Yankees refused to accept or admit defeat. They refused to lie down and die. They tied those two games against the superb Diamondbacks. Then they beat them. And those achievements against all probability and all odds resonated with the city that had refused to be crushed by the horrors of Sept. 11. Sport is not all, or even -- alas -- most of life. At the end of the day, a game is just a game, just as Sigmund Freud noted that a cigar is just a cigar. But because baseball is just a game does not mean that it is nothing. The people of New York City, like the rest of the American people, face a new 21st Century era of unparalleled threats and previously unimagined challenges to their security and even to their physical existence. The same news wires that Friday morning carried word of the Yankees latest triumph also reported a new series of suspected terrorist threats against major landmarks and bridges in California, including San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. National leaders have warned that the struggle against the new wave of terror will be long and will last for years, perhaps even decades. But precisely because the times are so uncertain and the way ahead so long and gloomy, the need for relief and celebration is all the more urgent. Advertisement The great sports blowouts at Yankee Stadium Wednesday and Thursday nights were just what the great city needed, and the rest of the nation too.
