Games last 18,000 innings, and players, players live and die on the field, they are buried on the field. Children and children’s children and children’s children’s children play in the same game, sons watch fathers die of very old and natural causes while rounding first or pinch-hitting for the pitcher or warming up for relief. A bunt is martyred and a balk a plague on entire generations. And if fate has a hand, a single home run in the bottom of the 18,000 inning sparks as many revolutions and end-of-the-world scenarios as the second coming of Christ and the invention of the cotton gin times about a billion. The skies open up on a day like that, they open up with a win and pour confetti until forever and forever until the world is coated in thick heavy confetti, and the axis of the endless ball just breaks.