They arrived at Logan Airport on Sunday night, and most of the Boston television stations were there to greet them. They hadn't figured on being here; they'd anticipated a champagne celebration that afternoon at Yankee Stadium, followed by a flight to Kansas City to begin the American League Championship Series. But they lost to the Indians, the Red Sox beat the Blue Jays, and now the 1978 American League Eastern Division championship would have to be decided by a one-game playoff at Fenway Park on Monday afternoon.

Most of the New York Yankees walked past the visiting reporters without speaking. Reggie Jackson also walked past, but not speaking . . . well, that wasn't going to happen.

Are you disappointed to be in Boston?

"No. Why should I be?"

You going to be here for a day or a season?

Jackson looked at his inquisitor, a slight smile on his face. He was silent for just a moment. "Bad question," he said finally. "I'm going to here for a day AND a season."

----

One of the perks of this job is that books arrive almost every day from publishers looking for reviews. Most of them I just forward along to the books editor, but this one stopped me.

"October Men: Reggie Jackson, George Steinbrenner, Billy Martin, And The Yankees' Miraculous Finish In 1978," by Roger Kahn.

1978.

I haven't read it yet; in fact, I've only opened it a few times. I'm a great admirer of Roger Kahn's but there are times when his New York-centric view of the baseball world, which has become more and more pronounced in his later works, grates on me; this absolutely would be one of those times. I've waited forever for someone to write the definitive book about the 1978 season -- the most artistically thrilling and historically significant of my lifetime -- and for all I know, Kahn may have done so. But for all I know he also may have taken the Yankees-destined-to-emerge-triumphant / Red Sox-destined-to-fail-ignobly shortcut, and I couldn't stomach it if he did.

----

The Yankees, wrote Roger Angell in the months following the '78 season, are raunchy and disputatious and hard for most of us to cotton to, but their scandals and harsh words somehow translate themselves into a cheerful and extremely dangerous pride when the going is toughest. The Red Sox are a team of watchers and quiet talkers, with a few true eccentrics and emotional zombies among them . . . These are decent, lonely men caught up in the dream of one perfect and thus perfectly unattainable season.

----

It's hard for me to fathom that there's a generation of Red Sox fans to whom 1978 is just a number from the past, like 1918 or 1949, but it's true. This is the 25th anniversary of that season, which probably explains the timing of Kahn's book, and 25 years is a long time. I began following the Red Sox in 1964, when I was 9; if you had gone back back 25 years from that point you'd be in 1939, which could have been 2000 B.C. for all it meant to me. I was 23 by 1978 and had been following the team for almost two-thirds of my life, but the 25-year anniversary of '78 was 1953, which was two years before I was born and, in my mind, utterly without contemporary meaning. The reality is, you have to be at least 30 to have any conscious memories of 1978 and probably at least 35 to have even a surface understanding of it.

Even among those of us who were there, the ending has consumed the beginning and the middle. For the longest time, 1978 was that perfect season. But it goes well beyond that. For the longest time, 1978 was vindication.

-----

On Saturday, August 19, 1972, I was a 17-year-old stockboy at a local department store. I was working a 1-to-9 shift, and we had the ballgame on the radio that afternoon. Luis Tiant pitched a two-hit shutout as the Red Sox beat the White Sox, 3-0, to move within 3 1/2 games of first place. The Sox hadn't been this close to the top this late in the season since 1967, and all anyone could talk about was the team's pennant chances.

I was looking at it differently. The '67 Sox -- also touted as a long-term powerhouse -- had fallen (well) short of expectations, but were being replaced by a newer, younger generation. Carlton Fisk was in the midst of a Rookie of the Year season, and he had just been joined by a young outfielder named Dwight Evans. Cecil Cooper and Ben Oglivie were breaking through to the major leagues. Bill Lee, Lynn McGlothen and John Curtis comprised three-fifths of the starting rotation. I knew there was a young shortstop named Rick Burleson in the minor-league pipeline, and I'd read promising reports about a young outfielder named Jim Rice in the lower reaches of the system. I distinctly remember -- as though it were yesterday -- standing in the stockroom cellar and thinking, as I arranged some boxes, that even if the Red Sox fell short in 1972, they were building a perennial contender. I became convinced, that afternoon, that the years ahead could be some of the greatest in team history.

And they were. Despite fumbling away some of the talent (like trading Oglivie for the end-of-the-trail Dick McAuliffe), the Sox' farm system, incredibly, produced an All-Star at almost every position in the first half of the decade. A near-miss in 1974 was followed by a pennant in 1975; if ever a team seemed on the verge of a dynasty, this was it. There was almost no sense of disappointment at the World Series loss to Cincinnati in '75. Everyone -- fans, players, team executives, everyone -- felt there would be many more grabs at the ring.

Except the Yankees -- sparked by a series of judicious trades, and working their checkbook to perfection as the free-agent era dawned -- hijacked the dynasty. They won the next two pennants, and added a World Series title to boot, and the decade that was supposed to belong to the Red Sox was slowly slipping away. When the 1978 season arrived, there was no more talk of a glorious future; the future was now. The Sox were determined to win.

They signed Mike Torrez as a free agent after Torrez had helped pitch the Yankees to the World Series title. They traded for Dennis Eckersley and Jerry Remy. They added a slew of second-tier free agents (Dick Drago, Tom Burgmeier, Jack Brohamer). They loaded up for an effort that would do more than merely allow them to win a championship; it would also secure their place in history. For if the Sox had won the World Series in '78, they would have accomplished exactly as much as the Yankees -- two pennants, one World Series title -- in the four-year span from 1975-78.

For the first four months of the season, it was better than anyone dared dream. On July 19 they were 62-28, a 111-win pace. They were nine games ahead of the second-place Brewers and 14 ahead of the fourth-place Yankees. Their pace slowed as injuries mounted in July and August, but they still were in first place by seven games as September dawned. Only trouble was, the Yankees were now the second-place team.

----

"Tell me," Carlton Fisk said to Peter Gammons as he cornered him in the lobby a New York hotel in mid-September. "WHAT'S WRONG WITH US?"

" . . . I've never seen a team in a crucial series play as badly as the Red Sox did tonight," said Reggie Jackson. "NEVER."

----

It was more than first place slipping away. It was more than a division championship. It was everything the Red Sox had worked for over the last five years, and it was slipping away in the ghastliest, most humiliating fashion possible. The Sox lost 14 of 17 and trailed the Yankees by 3 1/2 games on Sept. 16 . . . a mind-numbing 10 1/2-game turnaround over 16 days. They would go down in history, all right, and they knew it; they were so ashamed they wouldn't pretend to sugar-coat it with any smiley-face platitudes about winning 90-plus game or days spent in first place. "The abuse we are about to take," Burleson said at one point in September, "we richly deserve."

Except just as quickly as they began the plummet, they slammed on the brakes and turned it around. By September 30, they had won 11 of their 13 and were trailing the Yankees by a game. Trouble was, there was only one game left to play.

----

Two years ago, Rob Neyer spent a season in Boston for a book he entitled Feeding The Green Monster. He frequently attended games with Sox fans, and would ask them for their favorite Fenway moment. I was honored that he asked me to watch a game with him, and thought a long time about what my favorite Fenway moment was.

This is what I sent him. I feel a little funny about reprinting it here, since I wrote it for his book, but it's been out for two years now so I don't feel as guilty as I might. Besides, this also may make some of you aware of the book that may not have know about it; if you'd like to order a copy (and I highly recommend it), here's the link.

Anyway . . .

----

October 1 is a date that drips with meaning in Red Sox lore. In 1967, it was the day they clinched the Impossible Dream pennant. In 1977, it was the day they were eliminated from contention, inspiring (if that's the word) A. Bartlett Giamatti to write his stirring essay ``The Green Fields Of The Mind.'' (``It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart.'')

October 1, 1978 was a drizzly and dismal afternoon in more ways than one. The Sox were poised to complete their ignoble journey from 14 games ahead to historical infamy. All that stood between them and the cliff were the Cleveland Indians, who had to beat the Yankees in New York while the Sox were beating the expansion Blue Jays in Boston to force a one-game playoff.

``To be frank with you,'' Carl Yastrzemski would tell a television interviewer later, ``starting today's game I didn't have any hope at all.'' Neither did I. In those days the Sox would take the field to the final lines of ``Take Me Out To The Ballgame,'' courtesy of the sublime John Kiley at the organ. (``Root, root, root for the home team/If they don't win, it's a shame/For it's one, two, three strikes you're out/At the old ballgame'') As they did, the Fenway crowd -- vilified in recent times as self-indulgent whiners fixated on failure -- gave them a raucous standing ovation. We're with you, they were saying, and we still love you.

Tears came to my eyes. It can't end this way, I thought to myself. It can't. Please, I whispered to the heavens, do the right thing. Give them one more day.

There was a small radio station in New Bedford, Mass., about 40 miles south of Boston, that carried the Yankee games, and throughout the stands you could see transistor radios pinned to ears as people strained to catch the scratchy, thin signal. Hope rose when they reported Andre Thornton had homered off Catfish Hunter, but the Yanks had already tied it by the time the Sox game started. Now, with the Blue Jays batting, there was another stir.

``Gary Alexander just hit a home run!'' shouted a man about 10 rows in front of us, turning to face the crowd. ``Indians lead, 3-2!''

Thornton we could believe. But Gary Alexander?

Someone nearby stood. This was a time when scatological language wasn't quite as prevalent publicly as it is now, so when he said in a ominous voice, ``If you're bustin' our [fill in the blank] . . . '' it was considerably more threatening than it might be today.

``No! I mean it!'' the first man insisted. ``The Indians are ahead!''

Soon the score was 4-2. Then 6-2. Hunter was gone, and -- suddenly, euphorically -- the Sox weren't. What had been a funereal atmosphere, framed fittingly by the weather, turned electric. By the time the late innings rolled around, the Red Sox were comfortably ahead and the Yankees irretrievably behind. The season wouldn't end.

Just before the top of every ninth inning, the Sox of that era would list the next home game on the scoreboard. As Luis Tiant began his warmup tosses, we read:

RED SOX
NEXT HOME GAME
TOMORROW VS.
NEW YORK 2:30 P.M.

The joint erupted. Tears came to my eyes again. That straightforward announcement, in that context, had more meaning than the half-hour's worth of fireworks or ``WE WIN!!!'' histrionics or ``Who Let The Dogs Out?'' barking which would greet such a victory today. (I'd advise the modern hucksters to take note, but I know it's hopeless.)

Some say all that victory did was set up a heartcrushing defeat the next day, but I've never felt that way. I was never devastated by the playoff loss to the Yankees. It was a great game between two great teams that the Yanks happened to win. No complaints.

I would have been devastated had they never gotten the chance to play. And thus I learned that day that there's always hope, even when things -- literally and figuratively -- are darkest. Sometimes, justice does triumph.

Because baseball, and especially Red Sox baseball, is not designed to break your heart.

----

I honestly did, and do, feel that way. There was, and is, no disgrace in noble failure. The decade of the '70s was historic from the Red Sox' point of view, and -- while it's not the history they wanted, or had worked for -- it's a history I can live with.

Some, like New York radio personality (and rabid Red Sox fan) Jonathan Schwartz appreciated the moment. ("Freeze this minute," he wrote about the moment before Yastrzemski made the final out for an essay that appeared in Sports Illustrated early in 1979. "Freeze it right here. How unspeakably beautiful it is. Everyone, reach out and touch it.") Others, like Angell, focused on the ending. ("I think God was shelling a peanut.") I have no idea what Kahn thinks, because I haven't read it yet; I only hope it wasn't more of, as I wrote last summer, destiny's darlings vs. destiny's doormats.

It was, as Reggie Jackson said, a day and a season. The fallout from it reverberates to this day.

I just see it a little differently than most.