We sit through a lot of bad baseball, watch a lot of dreary 8-1 wins, shake our heads at all manner of errors, mental and otherwise, and we do it all for a moment like last night’s eighth-inning confrontation between Mariano Rivera and Chase Utley. You can’t script the drama in baseball, so sometimes the biggest moments come around and you find Rafael Betancourt pitching to Pedro Feliz. The matchups you want to see often happen in mundane situations. Last night, though, we had the setting for greatness, and we had players to match, and we got five minutes of hold-your-breath, bite-your-lip, too-scared-to-cheer tension as Rivera and Utley battled through seven pitches, a sequence in which they traded the upper hand twice—going from 1-0 to 1-2 and on to 3-2—as Rivera danced around the edges of the strike zone and Utley waited patiently for a pitch he could drive. There was a quiet intensity to the moment, two players known for excellence with an absence of flamboyance, professionals in the best sense of the word, executing against one another as a season hung in the balance.