("Game Six: Cincinnati, Boston, and the 1975 World Series: The Triumph of America's Pastime" by Mark Frost, Hyperion, 406 pages, $26.99).

Now that the baseball season is behind us, and we Red Sox fans are through nursing our grudges and scars, it is time to reflect on some of the glory days of old, and this book might just help us get through the winter.

I thought I remembered this penultimate game of the 1975 World Series rather well until I sat down with Frost's fine book and got caught up in the details of the game and the cast of characters straight out of central casting, people such as Pete Rose and Luis Tiant and Bill Lee. And we even meet some of the umpires and groundskeepers.

When the game began at Boston's Fenway Park on Oct. 21, after five days of rain, the home team was behind three games to two, and when the eighth inning began, they were behind six to three. But then came a three-run home run by pinch hitter Bernie Carbo. The game continued into the morning and the 12th inning when Boston catcher Carlton Fisk hit his game- winning home run.

Frost tells the story well, if in more detail than some readers might wish, but the most dramatic piece of sports writing ever came from Roger Angell's account in "The New Yorker." He ended that classic essay by writing of Fenway organist John Kiley playing Handel's "Hallelujah Chorus." And of how human caring plays an important role in our lives, even in the games we play. It is no doubt, he wrote, a kind of naivete, "the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball.…"

Oh yes, Cincinnati won game seven.

Charles Stephen is co-host of "All About Books," heard weekly on NET Radio.