Nomar fading away in Oakland. Junior hitting a buck-eighty-four in his last hurrah with Seattle. Mays making us cringe as a Met. Sports are never crueler than when they force us to watch our heroes on their last legs.

Vladimir Guerrero doesn't invite the same reverence as Mays, the same all-time status as Griffey, or even the same Fallonization of "Nomah." Still, there exists a group of baseball fans who watched Vlad from the beginning, who saw him burst into the majors as our generation's Roberto Clemente, making plays no one else could make, doing things no one else could do.

So when the Toronto Blue Jays (a team run by a native Montrealer and huge Expos fan) cut Vlad loose because they didn't think he could cut it even as a part-time major league player, our hearts were broken. Not because we suddenly realized the old Vlad was never coming back — we knew that long ago. But because one of the most exciting baseball players we'd ever seen was meeting the same ending as those other fallen greats before him.

They lost their damn minds. All of them.

Gary Carter's over the moon, of course. He's just whacked a double over Andre Dawson's head to snap a scoreless tie against the Cubs. The last at-bat of Carter's great career, and he hits a game-winner. The rest of the Expos are also thrilled, predictably.

But the most striking protagonists are the fans. There are 41,802 of them, blowing the roof off Olympic Stadium. It had been an exciting season in Montreal, at least by Expos standards. The team had already been eliminated, though, and Expos fans had shown a tendency to stay away when they had no reason to cheer. Two years earlier, the Expos played their final home game in front of 4,262 die-hards. The year after that, they spent the end of the season on the road, chased from the disintegrating Big O by falling concrete beams.

Not now. Where once there was apathy, now there was bliss.