“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart.” – A. Bartlett Giamatti, The Green Fields of the Mind.

That’s it. The 2015 Major League Baseball season is over and the Kansas City Royals were the last team standing. They topped the Mets 7-2 last night, in 12 innings, and are World Series champions for the first time in 30 years.

Now we’re left – as Giamatti so elegantly put it – to face the fall alone.

October wasn’t supposed to go this way. The Royals made it to the final dance a year ago, but prognosticators saw that as an anomaly. Coming into this season, Ned Yost’s team had the look of an also-ran. Ditto Terry Collins’ upstart Mets, who were viewed as not yet ready for prime time. No longer doormats, they were nonetheless projected as wallflowers.

Baseball is unpredictable, and what the Royals did in the postseason was almost unfathomable. They scored 51 runs in the seventh inning or later, and 40 runs in the eighth inning or later. Time after time, they turned deficits into leads, losses into wins.

Last night was no exception.

Curtis Granderson had homered, Lucas Duda had hit a sacrifice fly, and Matt Harvey had darkened the Royals’ night with a string of goose eggs. Behind their horse, New York led 2-0 through eight frames.

Heartbreak came next for the Mets.

Harvey, with 102 pitches under his belt, returned to the mound to start the ninth. The Citi Field crowd roared with approval, but it wasn’t long before they were moaning in anguish. Lorenzo Cain walked and Eric Hosmer doubled, and all of a sudden it was 2-1. That was it for Harvey, who’d convinced Collins – “sometimes you let your heart dictate your mind” – that he should remain in the game.

Jeurys Familia entered and proceeded to induce a pair of ground balls. The first one advanced Hosmer to third. The second one induced daring-do. Hosmer made a mad dash for home on a David Wright throw to first base, and as the crowd cringed, he slid in safely as Duda’s plate-ward peg was high and wide.

The game was now tied.

What followed fit the script. The Royals were going to be the Royals; it was simply a matter of how and when. In the 12th inning, a pinch single by Christian Colon drove in pinch-runner Jarrod Dyson for the go-ahead run.

Inevitability. Depth. As Ben Zobrist said earlier in the Series, “It’s a different game, but our team is built well for the National League; we have a lot of weapons on the bench.”

The speediest of those weapons scored after swiping second base. That Dyson did so on a 2-0 pitch was testament to yet another weapon: preparation.

Rusty Kuntz, Kansas City first base coach, knew from film that Addison Reed would slow down his delivery if he fell behind in the count. The key he passed along to Dyson was the righty reliever’s hips. As expected, Reed was 1.4 to the plate instead of the 1.1-1.2 that he was on the first two pitches. Dyson was safe by a country mile.

The Colon knock that followed brought joy to the heartland and despair to everyone for whom Ed Kranepool is a household name. When Cain doubled to clear the bases later in the inning, it was all over but the shouting. In a game that stretched into the wee hours of the morning, the Royals were once again the more amazing of the two clubs.

“Screaming, pumped up, and fired up” as he stood on the second base bag, Cain knew that Cinderella wouldn’t be donning Mets’ slippers. With Wade Davis warming in the bullpen, the normally low-key centerfielder said to himself, “It’s ours.”

Baseball is both beautiful and cruel. To the dismay of the Mets – and the Astros and Blue Jays before them – every October bounce seemed to go the Royals way. That’s not to discount their worthiness – Kansas City is a talented team – but given how improbable many of the wins were, there almost had to be divine intervention involved. Right?

Yost was actually asked prior to yesterday’s game if he believed in fate. Most managers would have responded to that question by saying no – teams make their own breaks and luck is the residue of design. Yost, for better of for worse, isn’t most managers. He admitted to thinking, “This is the way it’s supposed to be.”

Meanwhile, Collins said after the game that he won’t be sleeping much in the next couple of days. That’s understandable, because he has some decisions-gone-wrong to ponder. Unlike Yost, he didn’t pull the right strings at the right time. Maybe he will next year – his team has the talent to return to the postseason – but then again, maybe he won’t. The baseball gods will have a say in it. They always do.

But that’s next year, which seems like a million miles away. As for the here and now, the Kansas City Royals are on top of the world. They should be. They head into the offseason World Series champs.