The Reverie of Game Seven

“Game seven.”

The words themselves have a magical ring. Just saying the two “most exciting words in sports” sends the cliché generator into the red zone. For, indeed, players give “110 percent” in these games and “don’t leave anything on the field” as both teams have their “backs against the wall” and “everything is on the line”; it’s “winner take all” in a “do-or-die seventh game.”

They’re the words that plant even non–sports fans in front of the flat screen to partake of the drama, the urgency, the finality that a game seven offers.

And on Monday evening, the National Hockey League will have its ultimate showdown, its cash cow, the event that puts the suits in the home office in back-slapping mode as they watch the TV ratings soar: a Stanley Cup Final game seven between the Florida Panthers and the Edmonton Oilers, and it’s for — forgive me — all the marbles.

Game sevens weren’t always a thing. The early days of baseball featured random final series in which the finale could come in game three or, in 1887, in game 15. From 1919 to 1921 baseball experimented with a best-of-nine World Series, before settling, for the 1922 fall classic, on a best-of-seven, which is where baseball has been ever since. (READ MORE from Tom Raabe: The WNBA Needs Caitlin Clark)

Professional hockey, too, has used a variety of formats to crown its champion. In the early years, a single game determined the champion. Since then, Cup-winning teams have been determined by composite score after two games, best-of-three series, and best-of-five series. Only in 1939 did major league hockey settle on the present best-of-seven format.

So intriguing — and profitable — is the idea of a final do-or-die game that three of the four major American sports have built this finality into their playoff structure.

Seven seems like a fair number. Fewer games could produce a less-than-deserving champion; more seem gratuitous, possibly lending to boring contests, and self-defeating.

Writes Michael Weinreb in Grantland:

It is only natural to presume that — since it has proven near impossible for a team to rebound from a 3–0 deficit to win a seven-game series, and since a 2–0 deficit seems like so much less of a psychological black hole — the seven-game series is a Platonic ideal, and to extend it or shorten or otherwise experiment with it would be blasphemous.

The finality, the urgency of the game has produced some of the most memorable events in all of sports.

Maybe because it’s been around the longest, maybe because it still lays claim (at least officially) to the moniker “America’s pastime,” baseball has offered the brunt of these.

Two game sevens in the 1920s stand out. In the seventh game of the 1924 World Series, Walter Johnson, one of five inductees in the initial Hall of Fame class of 1936 and widely regarded as one of the nicest guys in baseball history, lost his first two starts in the series. In the ninth inning of a tied seventh game, the Big Train was brought in as a reliever and pitched three scoreless innings to give the Washington Senators their first and only world championship while playing in Washington. Nearly a century would elapse until another Washington baseball team won a world championship, the Nationals, in 2019, also in a seven-game series.

Two years later, in 1926, the St. Louis Cardinals, down three games to two to the New York Yankees, behind a great pitching performance by Grover Cleveland Alexander, took game six and were up 3–2 in the seventh inning of game seven when manager Rogers Hornsby signaled down to the bullpen to bring in “Ol’ Pete,” as he was called. The thirty-nine-year-old, however — and the report is disputed — was sleeping off a hangover from overtippling after his game six triumph. Up to the task, the cagey old-timer set down the Yankees for three innings until Babe Ruth reached first with two outs in the ninth. With Bob Meusal at the plate (a .315 hitter) and Lou Gehrig on deck, the Babe inexplicably took off for second base, and was gunned down easily to end the game, and the Series.

The Cardinals have had a knack for seventh-game appearances, winning in 1926, as mentioned, but also in 1931, 1934 (Gashouse Gang teams), 1946 (billed as Stan Musial v. Ted Williams but won when Enos Slaughter scored from first on a single in the eighth inning), 1964, 1967, 1982, and 2011, but losing game sevens in 1968, 1985, and 1987.

The Yankees, for all their historic glory, have lost more World Series seventh games (6) than they’ve won (5), and those losses have been heartbreakingly memorable — from the loss to Brooklyn in 1955 (Sandy Amoros’s sensational catch) to the 3–2 loss to the upstart Arizona Diamondbacks in 2001. But it was the seventh game in the 1960 series, often called the best game seven of all time, that everyone remembers. With the game tied 9–9 in the bottom of the ninth, Pittsburgh second baseman Bill Mazeroski hit a 1–0 pitch over the Forbes Field left-field wall for the only walk-off homer in World Series game seven history.

In the last decade, only the Cubs’ 8–7 final game victory over Cleveland in 2016, which ended their 108-year title drought and stripped them of their “lovable losers” label, had commensurate seventh-game emotion.

Some of the great moments in World Series history have occurred not in game sevens but in earlier contests, whether deciding or not. Willie Mays chased down Vic Wertz’s deep fly to center in the Polo Grounds in a 1954 game one, and Kirk Gibson launched his hobbling, fist-pumping walk-off homer in game one of the 1988 Series. Lou Brock’s infamous non-slide into home plate, which gave the Detroit Tigers life and ended up costing the Cardinals the 1968 Series, came in game five. Don Larsen’s perfecto was in game 5 of the 1956 Series. Joe Carter’s walk-off homer in 1993 was in a game six, as was Carlton Fisk’s wave-it-fair home run (in 1975). Possibly the most exciting game in recent World Series history also came in a game six, in 2011, when the Cardinals warded off two last-out, last-strike threats to tie the Texas Rangers in the ninth and also the 10th, and then win on a walk-off home run by David Freese in the 11th, 10–9. (READ MORE: Trouble in the Picklesphere)

NBA finals game sevens have lacked baseball’s level of drama. Although 19 Finals have been decided with an ultimate contest, many of the iconic NBA finals moments have occurred in games other than the last one. Michael Jordan’s 1998 game-winner versus Utah came in game six; his “shrug” game was game one of the 1992 finals; his “flu” game came in game five of the 1997 finals. Magic Johnson’s junior, junior skyhook was a game four affair (1987); his 42-point outburst as center (replacing an injured Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) to beat Dr. J’s 76ers was in game six in 1980. John Paxson’s and Steve Kerr’s game-winners both came in game sixes, as did Ray Allen’s game-tying corner three in 2013. Jerry West’s 60-foot buzzer-beater to tie the Celtics occurred in a game three.

Arguably, the first great finals game seven came in 1957, when the Boston Celtics, with new center Bill Russell, outlasted a Bob Pettit–led St. Louis Hawks, 125–123, in two overtimes, to win the first of Russell’s amazing 11 NBA titles.

Victimized for many of those titles were the Los Angeles Lakers, who faced the Celtics in the NBA finals throughout the 1960s, losing to them in game sevens three times. The heartbreaker was in 1962, when Laker Frank Selvy, with the score tied, missed an open 12-footer from the baseline with five seconds to go (the Lakers lost in overtime). All told, the Celts bested the Lakers in the finals in 1962, 1963, 1965, 1966, 1968, and 1969 (no wonder Jerry West is so cranky in Winning Time).

The 1969 affair went seven and garnered the last of Russell’s 11 rings. Played in Los Angeles, it featured a lucky bounce by a Don Nelson shot that, late in the game, hit the back of the rim and then the ceiling of the arena (I exaggerate only slightly) before dropping through the net.

Other memorable game sevens include the Willis Reed game in the 1970 finals, when the big center, hobbled with injury, raised the roof of Madison Square Garden by merely limping out of the tunnel prior to tipoff, then trundling up and down the court to hit two early jumpers and set the tone for a Knick triumph over the Lakers.

LeBron James’s fourth-quarter chase-down block and Kyrie Irving’s long jumper with 53 seconds left in the 2016 game seven gave Cleveland its only basketball triumph ever, and the first championship of any kind for the city since the 1964 Browns.

The hockey game Monday night packs added juice, for it provides an opportunity for the rarest of rare feats — a comeback from a 3–0 deficit to win a finals series. While any number of teams have successfully fought back from a 3–0 deficit to win early playoff series in all three sports, no baseball or basketball teams have ever done so in a World Series or NBA Finals. Hockey boasts the only such successful comeback — the Toronto Maple Leafs fought back to defeat the Detroit Red Wings after being down 3–0 in the 1942 Stanley Cup Final.

This year’s Edmonton Oilers have a chance to duplicate that feat on Monday night.

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