But despite the hoopla, or perhaps because of it, there is a distinct atmosphere of melancholia and loss in the city, particularly among its female baseball fans. Subway Series or no Subway Series, mid-to-late October means the end of baseball season, when Derek and Tino and Mike and Robin pack up their stuff and head back to Florida or California or Texas or whatever warm place it is that they live during the off-season. These men -- hardworking, loyal, humble -- provide the sort of excitement during the months of April to October that the women of this city find hard to come by in the males who saunter down its streets. And so, as the season ends and the baseball boys step off and ship out, many a woman's heart finds itself alone again.

I fell in love with the New York Yankees in 1996, after watching a playoff game at a friend's house over beer and chips. As the daughter of a football fanatic and girlfriend to a hockey nut, I was aware of the existence of the game but completely ignorant of its reality and the men who play it. The Yankees changed all that.

There was Chuck Knoblauch, the softspoken infielder and leadoff hitter blessed with a handsome, open face and gentle, long-lashed eyes. He was followed, of course, by Derek Jeter: 6-foot-3 and 185 pounds of sinewy muscle wrapped in smooth cappuccino skin and finished off by a pair of ripe buttocks like a voluptuous bow on a Christmas present. There was Paul O'Neill, the square-jawed, curly-haired Irish lad with the never-ending legs and a penchant for tantrums and the physical abuse of water bottles. And who could forget Tino Martinez, the smoldering, dark-eyed Cuban with the sort of sturdy lower body that makes a woman like myself want to fall to her knees and pray?

All of these fine young men still play for the Yankees, but I speak about them in the past tense as a way to distance myself from them during these last few days of the season. They have wives and girlfriends and children to attend to and I, like other New York baseball gals, have learned to repress my desires on cue, at least until the next season rolls around and the guys -- conditioned, well-fed and well-rested -- are back in town. The winter will be lonely for us. There will be barren, cold nights characterized by too many glasses of wine for too much money when, just months earlier, we shrugged off the same drink dates and after-work parties in order to be home in front of the TV with our boys. It will be -- as it always is -- a difficult winter without them.

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