Don't look now, but it's deja Diamondbacks, World Series and Halloween all over again

Forgive me if you’ve heard this before — and if you are a friend of mine, or a passing acquaintance, or even a complete stranger, there is a good chance you have heard it. Because no ghost story is told only once, and every good ghost story is told, again, on Halloween.

Particularly when some version of that same story is occurring to the same entities, years later, on the same day. And that day is Halloween.

This particular story first occurred on Oct. 31, 2001, when Halloween coincided with Game 4 of the World Series between the Arizona Diamondbacks and the New York Yankees.

And here we are in 2023. And it is Halloween. And it is Game 4 of the World Series.

And the Arizona Diamondbacks are in it.

Those were dark days when time stopped

Coincidence?

Not if you believe in ghost stories. And who doesn’t on Halloween?

Particularly since we still carry ghosts, and we still mourn for those who were lost 22 years ago.

On Sept. 11, 2001, boogeymen came to life and attacked us. Nineteen Islamic extremists hijacked four commercial airliners. More than 3,000 people were killed.

For a time, everything stopped.

The sense of shock and loss and anger and confusion were overwhelming and unrelenting until, slowly, very slowly, we started coming back.

Baseball helped. A lot.

Then came Game 4 of the World Series

The Diamondbacks, tough and resilient back then, as they are now, worked their way through the National League playoffs and into the World Series.

By Halloween night the team had won the first two games of the series at home. New York won the third game in New York. The fourth game was played in Yankee Stadium on Halloween.

How the DBacks are saving us now: As they did in 2001

Is the story coming back to you, now? If you’ve heard it before, forgive me. Like I said, I tell it a lot. I’ve been telling it … a lot … since that night.

There was talk in the dark days of 2001 about canceling Halloween, as if we should not take the chance of sending our children into the night. But we did.

Shortly after dusk I went out with my son and his friend Travis. I had a portable radio to listen to the ballgame, but no earphones. So I adjusted the volume to a level I could hear but would not intrude on the revelry of others.

My radio gathered a group of dads

There were lots of trick-or-treaters out. We’d gone only a few blocks when a man I didn’t know, along with his costumed child, approached me and asked, “Is that the game on the radio?”

I told him it was.

“Can I walk with you for a while?”

“Sure,” I said.

By the time the Yankees took a 1-0 lead, there were three or four fathers crowded around my transistor.

When the Diamondbacks tied the score with a Mark Grace home run, there must have been eight or 10. The radio by then was at full volume.

None of us kept tabs on our growing pack of superheroes, witches, Harry Potters, princesses and pirates as they descended on each house like a swarm of locusts.

It didn't matter the Diamondbacks lost

The night felt suddenly … normal. Which in those days was special. More than special.

It wasn’t just the ballgame, which was great, even though the Diamondbacks would lose on a walk-off home run by Derek Jeter in the bottom of the 10th.

Even that didn’t matter. Much.

It was living. It was being alive. It was appreciating a moment, relishing happiness in small portions.

During one of the late innings, as our gaggle of dads strolled down the middle of the street with the ballgame blaring, we saw coming toward us a family of three wearing homemade costumes from a popular cartoon show.

We soaked in normalcy, and SpongeBob

The child was a purple star fish. The mom was a squid. And the father, a tall man, was SpongeBob SquarePants. His big square torso was fashioned from cardboard and painted yellow. He wore brown shorts, bright yellow stockings and black business shoes.

He noticed us up ahead, and approached our group with the slumping posture of a condemned man headed to the execution chamber.

No one in our uncostumed cluster spoke. The only voices were those of the radio broadcasters.

It stayed that way until the colorful family walked past us and was well down the block, when one of the dads broke the silence and said with earnest, reflective admiration, “That was a damn fine sponge.”

Reach Montini at ed.montini@arizonarepublic.com

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Diamondbacks play Game 4 of the World Series on Halloween once again