GAME 6 - "This could be it."

Just when you think you’re free from sentimental baseball parables about The Meaning of LIFE, they suck you back into the vortex of sappy metaphors for loss and hope.

Of course, it is easy for me to get sucked in because I’m the lead sucker for this sort of hoke. Trapped in Brooklyn in the 1950's, I was baptized into the Dodger religion too early to know better. I suffered through a decade of almost beating the hated Yankees with all the imagined metaphors of good and evil spinning in my tousled head.

Then, they finally became winners when I was 12 years old - and my childhood was over, cut short in its prime by cruel capitalism and the stinging reality of inexorable change. The lesson was bitterly learned. Nothing (good) ever lasts. My childhood was stolen by the crime of the century when the devil O’Malley abused my faith, robbed me of my innocent belief in games.

Baseball movies try to capture the symbolism of these memories - when hope for perfection still lived. They trade on our naive wishes for heroism, justice, love, loyalty. But they often lose their balance. Melodrama overtakes, chokes away true feelings. They reach too far for the outside pitch of metaphor and whiff.

Bernard Malamud’s THE NATURAL is one of those pretentiously symbolic legend reaches. BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY is another.

FIELD OF DREAMS is probably the most blatant, trying to tie the game up with America’s stolen pre-1968 supposed innocence. I cried like every other sap when Ray choked out “Wanna play catch, dad?” But on reflection, I knew that the rebellion that had led the teenage Ray to reject his father’s stifling dreams for him had been a truer impulse.

At least BULL DURHAM swung at a faster pitch - equating baseball with sex - and hit it over the fence.

The lack of credible athleticism has always been problematic for actors in this genre. De Niro looked better as a boxer in RAGING BULL than he did as a catcher in BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY. Cooper was famously inept in PRIDE OF THE YANKEES, as was Anthony Perkins (FEAR STRIKES OUT).

Costner looks like he can play better than he can act and so, is credible as a fading pitcher (FOR LOVE OF THE GAME) and an ex-player (in the otherwise awful THE UPSIDE OF ANGER). Dennis Quaid (THE ROOKIE), and Charlie Sheen (MAJOR LEAGUE) have the same talent.

My own Dodger demons prevent me from sympathizing with the lore surrounding the Boston Red Sox. Although many northeast intellectuals have waxed poetic about the tragedy of rooting for this team which broke hearts for 70 years, I never could get worked up about them.

For one thing, I viewed the Sox as unworthy of devotion by comparison to my team. On the level of social symbolism, the Dodgers stood for integration (Jackie, Campy, Newk), while the Sox were for Whites Only - the last major league team to integrate. Their owner, Tom Yawkey, was overtly racist, and their fan base was almost exclusively White. Their fans booed Ted Williams - the last true American Hero, because he refused to love them back. And they booed Jim Rice, their only African-American star.

In 2005, FEVER PITCH played with Red Sox fanaticism in a romantic sitcom, matching Drew Barrymore with SNL's Jimmy Fallon. Adapted by Nick Hornby - from his own novel which was about Brit soccer nuts - and directed by the Farrelly Brothers, the movie was a success, giving hope to nerdy boys that a Drew might overlook their kiddy obsessions and find them "cute and charming" enough to fall for them.

GAME 6, a far better movie, sunk almost without notice the same season. Novelist Don DeLillo wrote the script. Michael Keaton is a playwright and Sox fan on the day of game 6 of the 1986 World Series, when the Sox, on the verge of winning their first Series since 1918, are destined to blow a two run lead with 2 out in the ninth and lose again, denying redemption for Keaton's character.

It is also opening night of Keaton’s play and the game becomes an imagined turning point, testing his faith in life. Robert Downey, Jr. is a scathing critic who Keaton seeks out to destroy after the game. An uplifting ending sugar coats an otherwise effective noir fable.

Both of these films have lost some impact because of the improbable coincidence of the Sox Series win in 2004. When my Dodgers finally overcame destiny and beat the Yankees in 1955, everything after that was anti-climax.

The world did change, but victory was hollow. They lost again the next year to the Yankees and then O’Malley crushed the rest of the illusions of youth, cruelly trading Jackie to the Giants and courting L.A.

O'Malley proved that THE GODFATHER had a better handle on the truth: "It's not personal - it's just business."

The sentiment of my childhood dissolved and I searched for something else to love, now wary of giving my heart to anything or anyone else.