3:36 pm, October 13, 1960

If you were alive and a Pirates fans, you remember where you were. If you had not yet been born, you learned it along with your ABC's. And if you were there, it still might not seem real. That's hardly unexpected. Even the protagonist in that day's storybook tale had a hard time wrapping his mind around the blow he struck on an unseasonably warm October Thursday afternoon that charged a city and changed a man's life, and he's been living that life every day for more than half a century. "Fifty years later, I don't think it's sunk in yet," Bill Mazeroski told Robert Dvorchak in a wonderful story written in 2010 to mark the 50th anniversary of the moment voted the greatest in Pittsburgh sports history and, arguably, the greatest in World Series history.

Game 7 of the 1960 World Series between the Pirates and New York Yankees had already given the 36,683 at Forbes Field that day their fill of drama and theater as had the six games that preceded it. The vaunted big-city Yankees, winners of seven of the previous 11 World Series and 18 overall, had outscored the Pirates by a combined 38–3 in their three wins, including 12–0 in Game 6. They had outhit the Pirates (78–49), out-homered them (8–1) and, with a 2.38 earned run average to the Pirates' 6.79, outpitched them. The mill-town Pirates, who had not been to a World Series in 33 years, not won one in 35, finished last or next-to-last in the National League eight times in the previous 10 years, and had won 23 games in their final at-bat during the season just to get to October, had scratched out 6–4, 3–2, and 5–2 wins in Games 1, 4, and 5.

That afternoon, the Pirates had seen a 4–0 lead after three innings become a 5–4 deficit after six, a 9–7 lead after eight, and then a 9–9 tie after 81/2. For a few minutes, maybe 10, it seemed that Hal Smith, a journeyman catcher, would be the game's hero and the player who would be remembered 50 years later after his three-run home run in the eighth inning put the Pirates ahead 9–7 and turned Forbes Field into "an outdoor insane asylum." But the Yankees rallied for two runs off Bob Friend in the top of the ninth, runs that elbowed Smith from eternal hero to historical footnote and made way for the 24-year-old son of an Eastern Ohio coal miner with soft hands, a legendary turn at second base, and 49 major league home runs to write his way not just into Pittsburgh history but into the very cement and steel and sky of the city itself.

Earlier in the game, Mazeroski had singled and scored in the second inning. Earlier in the Series, he had hit a two-run homer for what proved to be the winning runs in Game 1. But, like Smith, they became footnotes to the one at-bat that was to come, to the one swing that met a Ralph Terry "slider that didn't slide," to the one hit that would never get old, and to the one and only home run ever to end a World Series Game 7. "For a second there, I didn't know what to do," Mazeroski "wrote" in his Series diary that appeared the next day in the Pittsburgh Press. "But the message finally got to my legs, and I set sail." It wasn't until he approached second base that he realized it was a home run; that the ball that he hit toward left field had carried up and out, past Yankees left fielder Yogi Berra, past the Longines scoreboard clock, and ultimately over the piece of the Forbes Field brick wall that measured 406' from home plate.

Three-thirty-six in the afternoon of October 13, 1960. The game was over. The Series was over. The wait for Pittsburgh was over. "From second to home, I never touched the ground," Mazeroski said in 2010 — the year the Pirates unveiled a statue in his honor. By second base, he'd pulled off his hat. Between second and third, he waved his arms and his steps found new altitude. By the time he hit third, he'd been joined by seemingly half the fans in Forbes Field. By the time he touched home plate, the rest of Pittsburgh had joined them.

"It was V-E Day, V-J Day, New Year's Eve, and the Fourth of July all rolled up in one," wrote Vince Johnson of the Post-Gazette. "It elevated the status of a shot-and-a-beer industrial city trying to remake itself from its sooty past," wrote Dvorchak. "Emotionally, nothing quite like it had happened in Pittsburgh since 1758 when Gen. John Forbes clobbered the French," wrote...