From KFAN.com

What an incredible end to the most anticipated 24-hour period in recent Minnesota sports history. The Minnesota Twins, three back with four games to play, pulled off a come-from-behind, 12-inning, 6-5 win for the ages against the Detroit Tigers on Tuesday night.

Considering what was at stake, is it a stretch to call this game among the greatest “regular season” contests in baseball history?

“That’s as good a baseball game as I’ve ever been involved in, as far as courage from both teams, never wanting to say die, never quitting, and coming back,” Ron Gardenhire said. “There’s so many things to talk about in the game, but we came through at the end. After that 10 innings I was going, ‘oh my gosh I’ve never seen anything like this.’ It was just back and forth, neither team giving up.

“That was just sick baseball. In young people’s terminology, sick.”

After originally falling behind 3-0 in the third inning, the Twins came back to take the lead 4-3 in the seventh thanks to an Orlando Cabrera home run. Magglio Ordonez dusted a bomb of his own in the 8th to square things up once again at 4-4.

When the Tigers re-took the lead 5-4 in the 10th, it appeared as if the Metrodome would close its doors to Twins baseball forever. But a seeing eye single up the middle by Matt Tolbert scored Cuddyer. Two innings later, Carlos Gomez led off with a single and eventually scored from second base when Alexi Casilla — the man who’s walkoff hit in the third game of the season gave the Twins their first victory — slapped a basehit through the right side of the infield.

“Casilla and Go-Go (Gomez), that’s our loose cannons,” Gardenhire said. “And we were yelling that in the dugout, with Gomez leading off and I knew Alexi was coming up, we were yelling, ‘Let’s have a loose cannon inning,’ and there it is.”

There were countless storylines in this game, from Scott Baker fighting through an early deficit to hold the Tigers to three runs into the seventh inning to the diving stop Brandon Inge made in extra innings, preventing the Twins from scoring what would have been the game-winning run,  to Joe Nathan and Bobby Keppel pitching out of potential season-ending jams.

“A year ago I thought I was done with baseball, and now I’m celebrating in a big league clubhouse to go to the playoffs and play New York,” Keppel said. “This is a dream come true.”

A 4-hour and 37-minute marathon that saw the Twins use eight pitchers, and now they must find the energy to fly East for a match-up with the Yankees on Wednesday evening.

Keppel is right. We must be dreaming.

Clinching Notes, Thoughts and Tidbits

- The Tigers had runners on first and third with nobody out against Joe Nathan in the top of the ninth inning. History says teams score at least one run 88% of the time in that scenario. Watching Nathan and Orlando Cabrera (who caught the line drive and fired to Cuddyer to double off Granderson) run off the field like kittens on catnip was an awesome sight to see.

- One of the best sights of the night happened 40 minutes after the final out was recorded, when a group of Twins players grabbed general manager Bill Smith and showered him with beer. After all, Smith looks like a genius right now for his acquisition of Orlando Cabrera, who finishes the regular season with a 16-game hit streak thanks to his clutch 2-run homer in the 7th inning.

After an extremely slow start with Minnesota (Cabrera was hitting only .244 with the Twins as recently as two weeks ago), the veteran shortstop finished the year batting .288/.312/.419 with the Twins in 254 plate appearances. Not a bad recovery, and not a bad time to turn on the jets.

It’s still fair to criticize Smith and the rest of the Twins front office for not addressing the bullpen and/or middle infield earlier in the season (or in the bullpen’s case, at some point in 2008). But they eventually brought in Rauch, Cabrera and Pavano, and all three have been positive contributors.

For that, props to Smith for making moves that influenced the team in a positive way.

- Many people have said even if the Twins do win the division that they will have an impossible time beating the Yankees and/or Red Sox in a playoff series. I beg to differ. There’s a reason why the Major League Baseball season is 162 games. Baseball is meant to be played out over a large sample size. The best teams eventually rise to the top, winning 85-100 games, but over a short series many weird things can happen.

Variance, if you will. Variance in this case could come with a Twins squad that all of the sudden has a much better bullpen (thanks Rauch, Crain) than they did two months ago, and a few hitters (Delmon, Punto, Tolbert) who woke up from season-long comas to produce down the stretch. Not to mention, Carl Pavano has posted a 3.50 FIP since joining the Twins, meaning his 4.64 ERA in that same time span is not nearly as bad as advertised.

Oh, and Michael Cuddyer has turned into a more family-friendly version of Babe Ruth.

The Yankees are clearly the superior squad here. But since 1987, has there ever been a Twins team that enters the playoffs with less of a burden? Nobody expected them to pull of what they did this week, and nobody expects them to do much more than tip their caps and finish off the champagne they popped open from Tuesday night.

In baseball, anything can happen in a short series. Don’t write the Twins off.