MILWAUKEE - What does a moment sound like? It sounds like this: a crowd of 40,000 plus, standing on its feet, hooting and hollering and screaming and yelling and banging together two inflatable plastic cylinders, the brainchild of some sadistic marketing rep, winding and whipping and pounding and transforming a normally congenial baseball crowd into a legion of rhythmically challenged bass-drummers. But that's not it - that's not the moment. No, the moment is in the silence that follows, after the crack of the bat, and the thwack of the glove, when the pounding suddenly ceases, and 40,000 hearts get their last beat of baseball season, and the entire building is overcome in a deathly pall, so silent that you can almost hear the cleats clacking up the steps of the visitors' dugout and spilling out onto the field like the bench has just caught fire.
Phillies bats power NLDS victory over Brewers
"There is nothing,'' Jimmy Rollins will say later, "like silence on the road.''
Not this silence, anyway, the one that would have registered a negative number on the decibel meter if there was such a thing, a black hole of sound, perhaps, replaced by the shuffling of footsteps on concrete as a silent movie of sorts unfolded on the infield, Brad Lidge surrounded by teammates like Rollins and Ryan Howard and Pat Burrell, all celebrating something that at varying times this season appeared virtually impossible.
The Phillies are in the National League Championship Series. It became official yesterday, in the form of a 6-2 victory over the Brewers at Miller Park in the great state of Wisconsin, in front of a valiant home crowd that somehow maintained its zeal in the face of an early 5-0 deficit that was built largely by a three-run home run off the bat of the always-enigmatic yet ultimately triumphant Pat Burrell.
In other parts of the country, the events of yesterday evening may not have seemed all that momentous. For the vast majority of the history of the sport of baseball, including the last time the Phillies had a chance to celebrate such an occasion, there was no such thing as a five-game division series, no such thing as winning one's way into the right to play for a place on the sport's ultimate stage. In New York and Boston, a division banner is a piece of cloth with a number on it, and nothing more. But Philadelphia is not New York, and not Boston, and thereby not bound by the same restrictions on exuberance that bind the more successful among us.