The Cribbage Game that brought down the Third Reich! The Last NBA Game with Short Shorts! The Last Baseball Game without Performance-Enhancing Drugs!

The Incredible First Game After They Moved the Hash Marks!

A New Era for Humanity: The First Championship Football Game when Somebody Dumped an Icy Gatorade Bucket on the Coach!

We are witnesses to History.

...seems to be that it must involve a New York City franchise and/or a Boston team (e.g., the arthouse doc "Harvard Beats Yale, 29-29"). The book on the 1979 NCAA final qualifies because it's about future Celtic Larry Bird.

Pompous sports know-it-alls like me, we still need spellcheck.

For every best game there has to be a worst game, yes? If there is heaven, there is hell. If there is good, there is bad.

The Buckies and Bartmans or thirteen innings to end 0-1.

All those NHL games that ended in ties after double OT, or worse, scoreless.

The Lions last year, Bears during the Wanstadt years, Raiders in recent years.

Where are the books on the games that brought a sport to the brink of extinction? Michael Jordan playing baseball, hockey lockout, Tyson's 10 second fights (for $50 Pay per View)...

"It's the idea that NFL football didn't become our biggest sport in the last quarter of the 20th century because it played beautifully on the emerging medium of television, was marketed and organized brilliantly starting in the early '60s, jibed better with Americans' postwar tastes and internal rhythms than the more languorous, formerly ascendant baseball, had a vibrant minor league system with a passionate fan base feeding it already famous talent at no cost and a host of other reasons.

No, the NFL conquered the American sports scene because the Colts and Giants played an overtime humdinger at Yankee Stadium in December of '58. If they'd played a 9-3 dog we'd all be watching badminton or something on winter Sundays."

Good Stuff!

ajmilner - spellcheck doesn't catch all typos, and yours even makes sense (kinda).

...but it's been going on in general nonfiction for a long time now. A couple examples: A book called "Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World" came out over 10 years ago; "Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World" a bit more recently.

and I think we can agree that the missing link here is: "The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh."

We seem to be flooded with books these days that have titles along the lines of "How (fill in subject of author's academic hobby) Saved/Changed the World". You can't go to a bookstore these days without tripping over them. Sports is just catching up with the trend.

Sox - Yanks '78 AL East playoff

Twins - Braves '91 WS 7th game

Maybe they didn't change history - or maybe they did - but they were great games, nonetheless.

have seen live was not that meaningful. It was a 3-2 Quebec win over Pittsburgh in the regular season. That was a Pittsburgh team that had Lemieux and Jagr and before Quebec turned into a very bad team.

I find this all over the place, among writers I like (Malcolm Gladwell) and those I don't (Thomas Friedman). Sure, marketing will sometimes punch up the drama with a snazzy title like "Best...." when the text doesn't demand it, but there's a lot of determinism going on out there, too. It's a quick and easy way to seize control of a debate -- whoever can deliver the most compelling narrative wins, regardless of its validity.

I don't know if it was the greatest game ever, but given all the hue and cry about various other games, it's gratifying to see the Pirates-Yankees 7th game of the 1960 World Series get some recognition. The number of lead changes, the circumstances of some of the lead changes (a bad bounce on a routine ground ball that hit Yankee SS Kubek in the throat), the historic dominance of the Yankees during the 50's, the historic dreadfulness of the Pirates during the 50's, the only WS game to be won by a home run in the bottom of the 9th, the participation in the game of all time greats like Mantle, Berra, Clemente, and Mazeroski, the fact that the Yankees outscored the Pirates by about a gazillion runs over the course of the seven games but still lost--there are a lot of factors that contribute to this being a memorable game. I'm glad it's not being forgotten.

Your comment, teaparty, reminded me of a particularly foul game between the Dolphins and Browns several years back. Both teams were at or near the bottom of the standings, and the game was still scoreless well into the third quarter. I was fascinated by the exceptionally poor quality of play, so much so that I tried envisioning the game as a sort of Loser Bowl, the championship game between the losingest teams to see who's the biggest loser.

Since then, I've become a strong advocate that the league should implement a second set of playoffs -- teams that miss out on the regular playoffs should go into the Loser Bowl playoff. The big difference is that after each Loser Bowl playoff game, the winner goes home and the loser has to play the following week. The two teams left standing at the end of it all face off in teh Loser Bowl.

king:

i get everything you're saying, but the 1979 title game between michigan state and indiana state really qualifies. i don't want to bore you with a term paper on sociology and sports marketing, so i'll just say it again. magic versus larry really was the most significant NCAA basketball final ever, and the fact that they had those great sequels in NBA finals really sealed the deal on its role in history.

One of the things I liked about the book Nine Innings: The Anatomy of a Baseball Game by Daniel Okrent is that it describes a game that is an ordinary game, and through that framework probably tells us more about the game of baseball than all these Best Game Ever's will even dream about.