"It was the greatest thing I've ever been around in my life," Charlie Manuel said a couple of hours later. "It's absolutely amazing. I thought it would be good, but not this - it's nothing like I thought it was going to be.
"And what's good about it is it's all real," he said.
Manuel, the Phillies' manager, is the philosopher king - no matter how hard Chase Utley tried. Because if Utley did indeed supply the two-syllable gerund that captured a city's mood - "world f------ champions," a phrase that will live in fabulous infamy - it was Manuel who caught the spirit of the day in that one sentence.
Because it was all real.
So much of our sporting life is based upon artifice. We all play our roles - screamers, schemers, skeptics, all. There are days when none of us wants to let the facts get in the way of a good rant.
We worry when we should be happy. We shout when we should listen. There is plenty of unreality and insincerity built into a quarter-century of waiting for a championship. There just is.
But then it came for the Phillies. And then the day of the parade arrived and exceeded every rational expectation - in size, in scope, in sound and mostly in smiles.
That was the part that Manuel got exactly right. It was all genuine. It was all joy.
"When you see people come out, and they're hollering at you and screaming at you, you can tell it's all real," Manuel said. "There's nothing phony about it. This is way better than I ever expected.
"It feels unreal. I've never seen so many people happy in my life."
It began at 20th and Market, just past noon, following a heroic job by the police just to clear a path for the parade to begin. Pat Burrell got the place of honor, along with his wife Michelle and dog Elvis, on the front of a Budweiser beer wagon pulled by a team of Clydesdales.
