The Yankees were at rock bottom before the heroics of Anthony Volpe

It wasn't enough for Freddie Freeman to re-introduce himself on the short porch in right field, silencing a rabid crowd before they could even clear their throat. And it wasn't enough that the Yankees couldn't get a running back right away, despite the best efforts of the guys on the right field line to steal a baseball from Mookie Betts' glove.

No. Then, almost simultaneously, an inning later, there were 49,354 people all seemingly shouting the same question at once:

“What the hell is he doing?!?!?”

This particular interrogation was directed at Anthony Volpe, who had been standing at second base but somehow managed to only get to third base after a one-out drive by Austin Wells that was inches from the wall. Volpe stood at third base and understood the requests perfectly. He slapped his thigh.

“I have to get better,” he thought to himself.

A few minutes later he scored on a grounder from Alex Verdugo, so the damage was minimal. Still, a day after the Yankees had stunted their momentum by sending on a runner in Giancarlo Stanton they shouldn't have had, a moment when the third base coach was a little too reckless, they were now at risk of that Volpe was just a runner was a bit too cautious.

Now Volpe came to the plate an inning later. The bases were loaded, bottom of the third. They had also been eliminated three days earlier in the top of the ninth inning at Dodger Stadium, when only a single could have tied Game 2, 4-4. Instead, he had hit a Blake-Treinen pitch, with the ball landing about two feet from the strike zone.

“He’s still learning a lot,” Aaron Boone said a day later. “But he learns them pretty quickly.”

Anthony Rizzo had just appeared for the second time. The Yankees had loaded the bases all night so far and only had one run to show for it. Daniel Hudson was just a stone's throw away from pulling another plug out of the wall and bringing everyone a little closer to winter.

“Keep it simple,” Volpe told himself. “And be on time for the heating.”

Hudson didn't choose the heater. He walked a slider that rolled into the strike zone at 89 mph. Volpe made a full cut. And watched it fly.

“Honestly, I was just pushing,” he said, “and then I kind of passed out.”

Everyone else got to enjoy every second of the ball's 390-foot journey over the wall, right where the red Budweiser sign meets the red State Farm sign in left center field. The crowd – so nervous, so tense, so full of fear and unease – let out a roar that could be heard as far as the Montauk Point Lighthouse. The Yankees' dugout was Delta House.

“That was sick,” said Wells, who would also play in a game himself, adding a home run to his earlier double and teaming with his old minor league running buddy to lead the Yankees to an 11-1 in Game 4. 4-Win to Push Keep the season of this 120th World Series alive for at least 20 more hours and keep a touch of summer alive.

“When he hit the ball, I knew he was hit hard and I knew we were going to score some runs,” Wells said. “But when it went over the wall…that was pretty cool to watch from the circle on the deck.”

They scored four of them on that one hit, and suddenly a 2-1 deficit had become a 5-2 lead, and suddenly, for the first time since the 10th inning of Game 1, it was the Dodgers beating the Yankees hunted, and not the other way around. Suddenly, fans abandoned their plans for an Irish wake and instead tried to rouse the stalwart Dodgers.

And for one night they did.

And so the Yankees survive at least one more night, still aware of the long odds they face, but also knowing that while it's true that no team has ever recovered from a 3-0 deficit, in the world Series to win, but there were six of them who came back from a 3-1 deficit.

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And that's where the Yankees are now. Thank you to the only man in the room who knows what the Canyon of Heroes looks and feels like. Fifteen years ago, he played hooker as a child (with his parents' permission). Now it's still a long shot that he'll start all on his own, thanks to the fact that he's seizing the moment and delivering for the team he idolized as a kid

“He loves being a Yankee and he loves the guys he gets to do it with every day,” Boone said. “What they have in this room is real.”

And what they have in front of them is also real: another night at Yankee Stadium, where they take all their luggage with them and then expect a cross-country flight. Your ace on the mound, Gerrit Cole.

And a full tank of gas, thanks largely to a Yankees fan who grew up to be a Yankees shortstop and a Yankees hero of the first order in October. Sometimes real life really surpasses the movies.