Tonight, tonight, I'll see my love tonight. And for us, stars will stop where they are. Today the minutes seem like hours. The hours go so slowly, And still the skiy is light. Oh moon, grow bright, And make this endless day endless night... Tonight!

This is it, the night of nights. This is it, we'll hit the hits. And oh what heights we'll hit... ON WITH THE SHOW THIS IS IT!

They say that our infinite universe was once compacted into a sphere roughly the size of a dust mite's dandruff flake, and that everything burst apart with such force that we can still hear the bleat, and that objects are still hurtling off in every direction, and that someday, the flow of time will reverse itself, and everything will start returning to that eternal coffee crumb. Thus, whatever happens tonight, we shall someday relive it, moving backwards. 

It is to you readers, swimming in reverse, who started at the bottom of this page, and who are smirking now, because they know the outcome... it is you that I wish to address.

Damn. We shot a whole year on this team. We watched the Yanks dominate in spring training - best record in the league - and then we watched the rise of Aaron Judge, that potential statue in Monument Park, if not Cooperstown. We saw a kid, Dustin Fowler, rise from the minors, wreck his knee, never come to bat and then vanish, never perhaps to play for us - and we still don't know the implications... but you do.

We watched the Yankees rise, then fall, then come together at the end of the regular season. We argued about Trump, as did everybody in the country, and now and then, what united us were the tears from bad things happening - either from nature or from ourselves. And you already know if everything was just an illusion of hope, a waste of our precious time, whether we'd have been better off doing what we constantly threatened to do - devote this blog to the I.B.S. lady. 

When the whole year is one frickin' night, where should we have started? What should we have said that wouldn't look stupid, in retrospect? The last time we went through a Wild Card - you'll be reliving it in four years - we produced zero runs on three hits, and everything ended with Gardy trying to outrun the boos on a weak grounder to the second. Was that our fate again tonight? Yeesh, this time and space thing is confusing. From now on, let me address all of those moving in our current continuum.

Tonight, IT IS HIGH will host another in-game chat, as we did a few weeks ago. I won't live-blog the game - it undermines my juju - but I will check in between innings and after rallies or supreme mess-ups. I hope you join us, for better or worse. If we win, it's more fun. If we lose, we'll need each other.   

I hereby urge everyone to "dress" for the game. Wear your best juju shirt. In the past, I have bad-mouthed "lucky shirts." The truth is, if there is such a thing as "a lucky shirt," it would be owned by billionaires, not dorks like us. But lately, I'm thinking some billionaires may possess garments alter their position in life. What else explains Jared Kushner? If "lucky shirts" exist, maybe a few have fallen through the cracks - like nude paintings of Ben Affleck - sold at garage sales into our grubby hands. Today, I'll go through my wardrobe. This is one-game juju, folks. Dress for success.

Keys to the game? 

Aaron Judge needs to accept the walks that Minnesota will give him. 

Sevy must avoid the early home run.

We must not fall down by one or two in the second inning. 

Betances needs to sit this one out.  

We should worry about Miguel Sano.

The Girardi Sequence is working in our favor. (We lost Sunday, which means a two or three game winning streak.)

If we lose tonight, I shall hate the Wild Card until my dying day. 

R.I.P. Tom Petty. Too young.