Baseball's earnestly anticipated postseason ended before it began this week when the Minnesota Twins and the Detroit Tigers wrestled through four hours and 37 minutes of deliciously overwrought October melodrama that left one truth standing:

They can play every last one of the maximum 41 games between the American League Central tiebreaker Tuesday and the end of the World Series (slotted somewhere this side of Christmas Eve) and never duplicate for tension, passion, artistry and star-crossed narrative the 12 innings of sudden death the Twins and Tigers negotiated as the preamble.

The St. Louis Cardinals, Los Angeles Dodgers, Philadelphia Phillies, Colorado Rockies, New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox, Los Angeles Angels, and, now, even the Twins can set out upon the voyage for their playoff destinies, but, if you were looking forward to classical postseason conflict, you're better served looking backward.

For pure entertainment, the 2009 playoffs ended with the overture.

Yes technically, the Twins-Tigers one-game playoff was each club's 163rd regular-season game, yet I couldn't help but notice the six umpires and the bastardized starting time, both uniquely postseason adornments for what players on both sides called the best baseball game they had seen or played in. That there were 13 pitchers, two ties, and three lead changes is one side of it, but that the Tigers had a leadoff double in the second, runners at first and third and none out in the ninth, and the bases loaded with one out in the 12th and failed to score all three times is another. The upshot is the anticlimax to come.

I take no pleasure in delivering that prediction, as it is based solely on baseball's October tradition. Every time there has been an iconic one-game playoff to set the table, the meal has been wholly unremarkable.

In case you hadn't noticed, start by flipping back two autumns to Oct. 1, 2007 and the first one-game playoff in baseball history to reach extra innings. In the top of the 13th, the San Diego Padres went ahead, 8-6, and appeared to have exited a dreamscape in which the Colorado Rockies had won 13 of their last 14 games to necessitate this event.

But, in the bottom of the inning, against the game's pre-eminent closer, Trevor Hoffman, Kaz Matsui doubled, Troy Tulowitzki doubled him home to make it 8-7, Matt Holliday tripled home Tulowitzki to tie the score, and Jamey Carroll lined out to right, deep enough that Holliday scored face first. No replay ever showed Holliday's hand getting through catcher Michael Barrett's block, but the Rockies won, 9-8.

Almost immediately, four painfully uncompetitive division series ensued.

The Rockies swept the Phillies, the Red Sox swept the Angels, outscoring them, 19-4, and the Arizona Diamondbacks swept the Chicago Cubs. The Yankees could not even stretch the Cleveland Indians to five games. The American League Championship Series was thoroughly nondescript except for the Indians scoring seven times in the top of the 11th at Fenway Park to beat Boston, 13-6, in a staggering five hours, 14 minutes. Otherwise, the Red Sox outscored Cleveland in the final three games, 30-5. In the NLCS, the Rockies swept the Diamondbacks. In the World Series, the Red Sox swept the Rockies, outscoring them, 29-10.

A similarly desultory October followed Bucky Dent's heroics in 1978.

After Dent's three-run homer and Lou Piniella's remarkable defensive play in the Fenway's right-field shadows enabled a 5-4 Yankees victory that lay like an open wound in New England for the next quarter century, New York got by Kansas City in four games that were notable for nothing outside of George Brett's three homers in a 6-5 loss at Yankee Stadium Oct. 6. In the NLCS, the Dodgers were making short work of the Phillies, but were no match for New York in a six-game World Series in which the Yankees won the final four games by an average of five runs.

As far back as 1951, when a three-game playoff for the National League pennant between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants was effectively reduced to a one-game playoff, Bobby Thomson's so-called shot heard round the world overturned a two-run Dodgers lead in the ninth. Again, the events of a one-game playoff live among the defining moments in the game's history. By some accounts, Thomson's homer is the game's greatest moment.

And what happened after Ralph Branca walked off the mound that day for the Dodgers?

The Yankees beat the Giants in six games, outscoring them over the final three, 23-6.

So, let the anticlimax begin, and try not to think about the Dodgers coming into the playoffs with no .300 hitter and no 13-game winner, much like the Phillies on that second count, or about A-Fraud dragging a 8-for-59 postseason slide into the series with the Twins. I think the Phillies and Cardinals will advance, along with the Yankees and Red Sox, with the Yankees outlasting the Phillies in the 2009 World Series. If any of it is half as compelling as the Twins and Tigers were for one afternoon, we will be blessed.

Gene Collier's "Two-Minute Warning" videos are featured exclusively on PG+, a members-only web site from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.