01:00 AM EDT on Thursday, October 21, 2004

NEW YORK -- Now, then: that wasn't that hard, was it?

Not last night, anyway. In fact, it was surprisingly, mysteriously, almost errily simple.

The hard part had come in getting here. For the previous three nights, the Red Sox had been a baseball high-wire act, working without the safety of a net below.

One false step and they would have fallen out of favor with their loyal fan base and tumbled right into a brutal winter and miserable offseason.

But having stumbled their way through the first three games of their American League Championship Series, the Red Sox didn't make another misstep; at least not one that cost them.

By the time last night arrived, it wasn't complicated at all. There was nothing in front of them but a one-game season. After what they had been through in Games 4, 5 and 6, that hardly seemed a challenge.

They led, 6-0, by the time the bottom of the second had arrived, and the rest -- a shockingly easy 10-3 victory over the New York Yankees to capture the flag and move on to their first World Series since 1986 -- took care of itself.

Standing in the corner of a jam-packed victors' clubhouse, principal owner John Henry, who made his many, many millions working with figures, was asked to calculate the chance that a team would do what his team had just done.

"Impossible odds!" said Henry, his voice at once hoarse and soft. "There aren't any numbers. I can't even think. All I keep thinking is, this Saturday night, the World Series is coming to Boston."

Henry saluted his players who never quit, never stopped believing this series was still winnable. And capped their comeback on the Yankees' playing field, where the Red Sox had suffered so many crushing defeats, including one almost a year ago to the day.

"After last year," said Henry, "we wanted to get back to the very same spot -- and do it right this time."

Henry was asked whether, from his seat near the Red Sox dugout, he found himself thinking about last year.

"Yes, you think that," he said, with a solemnity of someone thinking about a family member who had passed on. "But in the next thought, you're thinking doing everything you can to get back to the same spot again."

Not far from Henry, general manager Theo Epstein was asked how the champagne tasted, the same champagne that seemed to saturate his every pore.

Epstein raised a beer can and answered: "Just a simple Bud; the champagne can wait until the World Series."

Then, Epstein, all of 30, but a native of the Boston area, dipped into history.

"This," he said, meaning this comeback, this victory, "is for all the Red Sox teams and players who never experienced this. The 1949 team, with Bobby Doerr and Ted Williams and Johnny Pesky and Dominic DiMaggio . . . The 1978 team that should have won that playoff game."

This was for all the fallen Red Sox heroes of the past, who hadn't tasted the celebration -- beer or champagne.

History, after all, is never far from the Red Sox. It stalks them, haunts them at times, reminds them of the close calls and the near-misses. For all the great players who have worn the uniform, none -- none in the last 86 years, anyway -- had tasted a victory so sweet.

But in the last week, the Red Sox tackled history head-on. At once, they wiped out their inability to beat the Yankees with everything on the line and overcame the 0-3 deficit that had beaten 25 teams before them.

No team had managed to get to Game 7, but the Red Sox would neither be satisfied nor deterred from their goal. Making the ALCS interesting, or competitive, or respectable, was never on their To-Do List.

They wanted it all.

A TV reporter approached Curt Schilling, busy opening a bottle, and stuck a microphone in front of his face.

"Curt, this is what you came to Boston to do . . ." he began.

The pitcher interrupted him.

"No, it's not," he said. "I came here to win a World Series."

But last night, for the moment, when the Sox threw off the shackles of history that weighed them down for generations, it was good enough.