The series score after three games. In one hundred and one years of Major League Baseball postseason play, no team had recovered from it in a best of seven.
It had been faced twenty-five times before. It had never been done.
Eighty-six years
Boston last won the World Series in 1918. The intervening period generated an entire folklore, most of it centred on the sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees and most of it involving losing to the Yankees at the worst possible moment.
In 2003 the Red Sox had lost the same series to the same opponent on a walk-off home run in the eleventh inning of game seven.
Game three
Boston lost 19-8 at Fenway Park. It was not a narrow defeat and the local press treated the series as finished.
The stolen base
Game four reached the bottom of the ninth with Boston trailing and Mariano Rivera pitching. Rivera is the all-time saves leader and the most reliable postseason closer in the sport's history.
Kevin Millar walked. Dave Roberts came in to pinch run. Roberts had appeared in forty-five regular season games for Boston after arriving at the trade deadline.
Everybody in the ballpark knew he would attempt second. Rivera threw to first three times. Roberts went anyway and made it. Bill Mueller singled him in. David Ortiz won it with a home run in the twelfth.
Games five, six and seven
Game five ran fourteen innings and lasted nearly six hours. Ortiz won it again.
Game six is remembered for Curt Schilling pitching with a sutured ankle tendon and visible blood on his sock. The injury and the procedure are documented; the sock became a long-running argument that does not change the seven innings he pitched.
Game seven, at Yankee Stadium, Boston won 10-3.
The World Series
Boston swept the St Louis Cardinals in four games and did not trail at any point in the series.
The wait ended at eighty-six years.
Since
The 0-3 comeback has not been repeated in Major League Baseball. It remains the only one.
Why it goes on a wall
Because the whole thing turns on ninety feet, run by a substitute who was on the roster for exactly that purpose, against the best closer who ever pitched, with everyone in the stadium knowing what was coming.
It had never been done.