I have written previously that I rarely stay up to watch the end of baseball playoff games anymore - they just go too late, while I've become something of a morning person. However, I had to pull an all-nighter on Tuesday covering the stupid election up here in Canada, and haven't quite gotten back on schedule so I stayed up to watch the entire Red Sox-Rays game. And if you're gonna stay up and watch one game... well, I guess this was the one.

Back in July I compared the Rays to the first team I ever rooted for, the 1985 Toronto Blue Jays - a young team that made its first postseason appearance after beating back a more experienced Yankee team, then in the ALCS fell to the Royals in seven games. Unfortunately, I was ten years old at the time, and while the series left an impression, the details are hazy. Fortunately, Bill James wrote at length about the series:

"When the playoff started, it didn't take them long to make a believer out of me. The Blue Jay team that I had seen was a superbly talented team, but a team which made exactly the kind of mistakes that lose playoffs, and plenty of them.

But in the first two games of the playoff, it was the veteran Royals who made the mistakes. They made so many mistakes in the first game that they wiped themselves out, losing 6-1. In the second game, they made just enough mistakes to lose, being charged with three errors and blowing the lead twice."

The Jays won three of the first four games, and it would have been a sweep had it not been for a certain third baseman. They then lost three in a row.

So for the past three months, I've been expecting that the Rays would follow in the same steps as the Jays - that they would finish the season in first place, roar out of the gate in the playoffs, then stumble and get knocked out in seven games by either the Red Sox or Angels (which is not to say that, when the Rays opened up a 7-0 lead last night, I was calling up my bookmaker to find out what the odds were on a Sox comeback).

And it's still very possible that they'll beat the snot out of Josh Beckett on Saturday. Although if they don't, I'm not sure that I like their chances against Lester in Game 7... either way, we'll all marvel that, no matter how confident or dominant a team looks early in a series, they can look completely different when the time comes to close the deal. Just like we've done many times in the past, and will surely do in the future.