Today, the St. Louis Cardinals play their final game of the season. No postseason chase. No champagne-soaked locker room. Just one more lineup card, one more walk to the mound, one more ninth inning. And then, silence. At least from them. At least for a little while.

Endings can happen a few different ways. Sometimes they’re sudden. Unexpected. Sometimes they’re tidy. Less of a bang, more of a soft fade—like the last note of a song dissolving into silence. The season doesn’t end when the final out is recorded. It ends in the quiet moments after: when the cleats are unlaced, the lockers cleared, and the lights dim on a summer that held both heartbreak and hope.

But endings are not erasure. They ask us to look back and name what mattered. In baseball, that might mean honoring the walk-off

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