Yes, there exist contemporary accounts of the final out, which came when Tigers catcher Boss Schmidt succumbed to Cubs pitcher Orval Overall, a name so good that you might think it was invented: He certainly sounds like a fiction, and a bad one at that, but let's take it on faith that the Cubs did win the 1908 World Series behind a citrus farmer named Orval Overall, of Farmerville, Calif.

We'll have to. The game is not in the living memory of a single human being. The average life expectancy for men in 1908 was 49.5 years, so that the few eyewitnesses to that victory -- among players and spectators alike -- were becoming scarce even by World War II. It is now customary for athletes to say after winning a championship, "No one can take this away from us," but perhaps we should make an exception for the 1908 Cubs, not because they didn't prevail over the Tigers in five games, but because it's possible that the 1908 Cubs were not of this world.

We owe it to history to at least consider that those Cubs were -- and I beg your patience here -- aliens from outer space.