Because we’re suddenly in the habit of it, this World Series matchup has been freighted with meaning. What came before and what looms ahead make it all feel undeniably meaningful. The last two years, we saw a financial behemoth with more disproportionate spending power than any team has had since the Yankees dynasty—not the Jeter one, or even the Jackson one, but the Mantle one—validate its greatness and the completeness of its power by winning the World Series. Each time, they conquered the mightiest juggernaut the American League could offer. Sometimes, even if we’re particularly dedicated to a given philosophy, experience invades and imposes a different one on us. When the Atlanta Ship of Theseus won it all in 2021; when the Phillies whoopsie-doodled their way to a pennant in 2022; and when the Rangers and Diamondbacks collided in the most auraless World Series that may ever befall any of us, it was easy to see the playoffs as a crapshoot. Then, Shohei Ohtani signed with the Dodgers and won it all twice in a row, and it was like the God particle had been discovered all over again. That messy egalitarianism that seemed to have settled over the sport burned off like low-lying fog on an unseasonably warm autumn morning, and we all saw (or imagined, at least) the ugly truth: Only power matters; only money wins.

That makes this matchup a violent reversal. It’s not a return to the (frankly) unpleasant but understandable entropy of a few years ago, but it reads like a stern rebuke of anyone who bought in too hard on the narratives of enduring Dodger supremacy. The Rays were clearly the best team in the American League this year, and they’ve played like it in October. The Brewers were clearly the best team in the Western Hemisphere this year, and they’ve played like it in October. These two teams are as demonstrably superior to the Dodgers and Yankees as those teams were to them a year ago, so either you tell yourself that those differences were smaller than they seemed all along (a sound sabermetric stance, if an unwanted one) and that only chance has produced these three seemingly significant World Series showdowns, or you admit of a more permeable membrane between the elite and the merely great—one that can be traversed without a $300-million payroll, even.