It's Game 3 of the World Series. The Yankees have their backs against the wall. They lose the series 2-0 and in the fourth inning – featuring Aaron Judge, Giancarlo Stanton and Jazz Chisholm Jr. – they lose by three. The Home Nine desperately need a win – to get back into the series and keep their title hopes alive, but also to restore some of the aura that once defined this proud franchise. A three-run deficit can disappear in the blink of an eye, and with the deciding point just around the corner, it felt like this moment was the time to strike. Sitting high in the right field stands where the Yankees had set up their additional press box (the “aux box”), I rose and felt with the crowd (who hadn't seen a World Series game at Yankee Stadium in 15 years). the onslaught of October baseball.

As I looked around at the worried faces of the crowd, the ghosts of Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio and Mantle swirled in the autumn air – but something felt strange. A new character had emerged. As the entire group hung on every pitch, hoping Judge could get a rally going, a digital glow crept into the corner of my eye. The boy in front of me had his iPad out. Peter Griffin made his way through the Fortnite universe.

This is not intended to be a defining statement about Generation Alpha, but rather about the state of the New York Yankees. That aura mentioned above – which all previous generations of sports fans were inherently aware of – has slowly faded with each of the last 14 World Series in which the boys in pinstripes did not appear. There were glimmers of his return during the Game 4 victory and in the early stages of Game 5, but when the Yankees suffered a Deepwater Horizon-level disaster in the fifth inning, the aura reached the lead. When the New York bullpen faltered in the eighth, things went uphill, and when the finale was taped, things skyrocketed, cementing a brutal loss on the biggest stage. The Yankees, the New York Yankeesbecame the first team in Major League Baseball's incredibly long history to lose a World Series victory by blowing a five-run lead. For people of a certain age, the idea of ​​the Yankees collapsing so dramatically in the literal World Series is incomprehensible. When everything began to unravel in Game 3, perhaps it did so one way Was less exciting than a YouTube clip of someone else playing video games. It's not the child's fault, it's simply the world they were born into.