I missed this during dinner last night. Miguel Cabrera’s double in the sixth, part of the four hit natural cycle, hit the third base bag:

What’s happened already has been special, and what happened in Thursday’s 7-5 Tigers win bordered on wacky. So wacky that when Lamont, the Tigers’ third-base coach, said he had sent a clubhouse kid out trying to get the third-base bag after the game, it made perfect sense.

Hey, if the Tigers come all the way back and win this series — and doesn’t that seem totally possible now? — that base will live on in the history and the memory of two teams and two states.

That base. The one that Miguel Cabrera’s sixth-inning ground ball hit, the one that turned it from a rally-killing double play into a tie-breaking double, the one that at the very least sent the Tigers’ season back to Texas for Game 6 on Saturday night, and just maybe changed the course of an entire series.

“Sometimes you need a little luck,” Lamont said. “Sometimes a lot of luck.”

I sometimes get chided for attributing baseball results to luck, there was a lot of that on tap the last couple of days, and throughout the playoffs. Compare Curtis Granderson’s first inning catch in game four of the ALDS to Mark Kotsay’s non-catch in the first inning of game three of the NLCS. Both could have gone either way, and the opposite result greatly effects the outcome of the game.

As for Cabrera’s hit, it seems the good players get the luck breaks.