The 11th inning morphed into the 12th, and the 12th gave way to the 13th.

Surely, this marathon between the Dodgers and Blue Jays last Monday night would only take another inning. Or so I told myself.

If only a person knew in the 11th that it was going to go 18, you could easily just click the thing off. But it entices you into one more, and you become a junkie, certain everything’s going to be settled with just one more inning.

Of course, it finally ended a scant few minutes before midnight – on the Pacific Coast, that is. In Toronto, that’s a mere few minutes before 3 a.m., and we can be fairly convinced that not a lot of schoolkids in Ontario there were awake to see it.

Nor were their parents.

It was an extreme night, to be sure, but in the East, even if the game ends after two hours, which would be pretty unusual, that’s 10 p.m., when most kids are in bed, and a whole lot of the working world is as well.

It called to mind something I heard recently on a sports-talk show. The host was recalling how his late father loved day baseball in the major-league playoffs. It’s a bygone thing, a period piece, de rigueur when we were kids but now gone the way of the wall phone.

Funny thing. It seems incongruous to have some day baseball in today’s playoffs. We have to have night baseball, and it only makes sense. It’s when people can watch, not at 1:30 in the afternoon when they’re teaching history or installing rivets for Boeing or packaging cardboard boxes at Amazon.

It occurred to me, though, that the appearance of day baseball in 2025 makes it, counterintuitively, important. And thus, cool. At points early in the playoffs, there are too many games to contest at night, so they’re played in daylight. They’re different. That attaches an exclamation point to them, and instead of diminishing their impact, it adds to it.

And for those of a certain age, it takes us back.

In third grade, in early October in Connecticut, I shooshed noisily through a mantle of autumn leaves and made my way back to our duplex, where somebody was excited about what had just happened in the World Series. I didn’t understand what it meant, Don Larson throwing a perfect game for the Dodgers against the Yankees.

A couple of years later, on afternoon TV, there were the Dodgers, now in Los Angeles, hosting the go-go White Sox in a silly, makeshift Coliseum with a 250-foot distance down the leftfield line, made equitable in somebody’s mind by a 40-foot fence. It was probably appealing to a kid because it resembled Wiffleball.

In 1960, I was in Mrs. Wellstead’s seventh-grade math class when Bill Mazeroski unspooled his winning home run against the Yankees, except nobody called it a walk-off back then. I’m pretty sure there was some goofball running with him around the bases, because around history’s biggest home runs, there usually was. What I committed to memory was that the Yankees lost that Series in seven despite outscoring the Pirates, 55-27.

And then a couple of years later, I had a problem with a neck muscle that caused me to miss school for the first time in six years. On the bright side, I was able to catch World Series Game 6 between New York and San Francisco, delayed four days in the Bay Area by heavy rains.

For some reason, the rest of the World Series in the ‘60s, day-baseball-style, don’t register with me quite so indelibly. And in 1971, Pittsburgh hosted Baltimore in the first Series game at night.

Day baseball in the playoffs was gradually on its way out, the forces of television exerting their inevitable influence. Fifty-four years later, in a game between two good-hitting teams that couldn’t seem to assemble a run, Toronto damn near had some day baseball on TV again.