This was a game that should have been bottled and put in a time capsule. If Rembrandt had painted a ballgame, this would have been it. It was all it had been touted to be, and more, like a winning lottery ticket, maybe even your first kiss.
"Wasn't this wonderful?" Bobby Valentine, the former Mets manager and now an announcer for ESPN, said after the game.
Beyond all the glorious elements, there was a moment of possible tragedy. But even that -- an injury to a player -- turned out not to be as serious as it had first seemed.
The game featured the Yankees' starter, 40-year-old Roger Clemens, trying for the third time to reach a historic career milestone, 300 victories. The Cubs' pitcher, 25-year-old Kerry Wood, took the mound with determination, as if to say, "Not so fast, old-timer."
Both strikeout artists, one perhaps the best pitcher of his generation, the other with the potential to be his successor. Both burly Texans who could lift a piano and move it across a room. And the pitching matchup lived up to the hype for a significant part of the game.
It was two historic teams playing the second game of a weekend series, the first time that the Cubs and the Yankees have played meaningful games since they met in the 1938 World Series, when Seabiscuit the horse and Roosevelt the president competed for the most headlines.
This might have been enough to quicken the heartbeat of the standing-room-only crowd of 39,363 fans who jammed Wrigley Field, the world's most beautiful ballpark.
"The stadium was out of control," Wood said. "Sometimes in the dugout you couldn't hear yourself think. It was awesome."
Eric Karros, the Cubs' first baseman, added: "This is probably the most electrifying game as far as atmosphere that I've ever been a part of."
But there was more for the pleasure of the paying customers. It was a perfect day for a ballgame, in the beach-weather 70s, the sun shining sweetly after days of miserable gray and rain, the breeze off Lake Michigan rippling the pennants atop the hand-operated center-field scoreboard and above the upper deck.
Ernie Banks, the great former Cub slugger, might have said -- instead of his usual slogan, "Let's play two" -- "Let's play until tomorrow."
The fans were thick in the bleachers beyond the ivy-covered outfield walls, crowded in the boxes beyond the short, red-brick wall and on the rooftops of apartment buildings across from the park on Waveland Avenue and Sheffield Street. .
To add to the delicious quaintness and splendor of the day, in the nearby distance a perky elevated train periodically rumbled by, to provide just the right touch of neighborhood. It was a perfect day for baseball, also, because the felicitous tension drew away to a great extent some of the sour baseball aspects of the Sammy Sosa incident earlier in the week. The Cubs' generally jubilant right-field icon was discovered to have used an illegal bat, one with cork, which is alleged to help propel balls farther than bats made entirely of ash or of maple.
But there was no controversy Saturday. The game was 0-0 into the top of the fourth and Wood was striking out the Yankees' hitters as though he were caught in a dream of Walter Mitty's.
The Cubs' crowd gave Clemens, the gallant opponent, a standing ovation when he was taken out of the game. He obviously was reluctant to leave the game, and didn't acknowledge the generous and genuine farewell.
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