Deathly Numbers.(The Talk of the Town)

Correction appended.

Barry Bonds, the Lord Voldemort of baseball, has prevailed in the end, rapping the enchanted No. 756 and, for the moment, closing a complex tale that has held us too long and (here in Eastern Daylight Time, at least) way too late. The image may not hold up, since it casts baseball commissioner Bud Selig as Harry Potter, but for half a decade now a dank moral haze and a sense of unlikelihood have surrounded the Giant slugger Bonds as he pursued the famous seven-hundred-and-fourteen lifetime home-run mark established by Babe Ruth, and then Hank Dumbledore's all-time seven hundred and fifty-five. An irritated non-reader (or non-fan) who happened in on this story three days earlier and saw Commissioner Selig standing up in his box in San Diego but not applauding Bonds as he circled the bases after his tying seven-hundred-and-fifty-fifth poke, against the Padres, would sense at the same moment that footnotes or a movie version would not begin to clear things up. You had to have read the books.

Bonds's record dinger, in the fifth inning of a night game against the Washington Nationals at Petco Park, in San Francisco, came in his third at-bat of the evening, succeeding a loud double and a single. One vacationing Maine-coast cottager with a dinky summertime TV set--this cottager--had recently fallen into the habit of going upstairs to brush his teeth and put on his pajamas after watching Bonds's first at-bat, returning before the second one, and tottering back up to bed when it was over, never mind the rest of the game. This time, the vision of Barry's locked-in, more characteristic swings kept him awake, and brought him back down again minutes before midnight: just in time for the blessed three-and-two solo blast, four hundred and thirty-five feet to right center field, and the clenched fists to heaven; the slow but not too slow base-circling; the extended-family hugs (including one with Willie Mays, who is Bonds's godfather); a careful but placating prerecorded concession by the saintly and now deposed Hank Aaron, delivered on the JumboTron ("I move over now and offer my best wishes to Barry and his family on this historical achievement"); and locally--on the stairs once again, with the set turned off at last--a "Yesss!" in the dark.

The rejoicing here is not just over an expected natural decline in the booings and editorializings about Bonds's inferred but unproved use of steroids during the 2000 to 2003 seasons, late in his career (he is ...