Pittsburgh ? There are some moments that are more than moments. They are momentous. One such occurred in these precincts at 3:36 p.m. on Oct. 13, 1960.

The odd thing is that so many momentous moments occurred that year. The sit-ins at Greensboro. The Sharpeville massacre in South Africa. The trial of Francis Gary Powers. The FDA approval of the Pill. The capture of Adolf Eichmann. The independence of the Congo. The first presidential debates. The election of the first Catholic president.

All that is important, but their importance is for another day, another column. What is important to us here in Pittsburgh, where the day and year are still celebrated and remembered for their mixture of power and poetry, of drama and deliverance, is that 1960 is the year Maz blasted his way to victory and into history.

We remember the late-afternoon, late-inning drama. We remember the pitch. We remember the pop of the ball against the bat. We remember the way Yogi Berra watched the ball soar over the Forbes Field wall, the way Bill Mazeroski (and half a century later, hardly anyone uses both names, or even the last three syllables of his name) held his hat on high — a moment of pure surprise, pure joy, pure exuberance captured unforgettably in a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette picture by James Klingensmith, himself celebrated for his photographic brilliance 50 years after the event.

For those who were here — for those 36,683 who were at Forbes Field, and for those hundreds, even thousands, who believe they were but were not — this was a moment of reverence and redemption. For the rest of us, especially we who came here later, it is a notch on Pittsburgh’s bench, a moment of baseball magic and mystery that the town and the team, generous spirits both, are willing to share, as if there is enough pure goodness in it to go around.

Of course some of this we don’t really remember at all but think we do, having seen a remarkable George Silk photograph of University of Pittsburgh students, the college boys in coats and ties, one of them holding a transistor radio with his second finger in a safety loop assuring that the device didn’t get flung onto the street below, another holding a pack of Marlboros upside down, assembled there at the top of Pitt’s signature building, the Cathedral of Learning. The picture, which appeared in the Oct. 24, 1960, edition of Life, is sometimes known as “Forbes Field Forever.” That title is the victory of hope over experience, though it must be conceded that while Forbes Field didn’t last forever, that image will. And it tells us what the box score can’t.

For the box score, that overrated icon in agate type, tells us next to nothing, as it almost always does. The newspapers (and you had to look at an actual newspaper to see this — no Web then) listed merely these numbers: 4 2 2 1. The last digit is for the most stunning RBI in baseball history.

The World Series record tells us little more. It shows that Pittsburgh defeated New York, 4-3. But how easily those place names, or those digits, could have been reversed, how easy it is to imagine a far different outcome, with no ball in the sky, no pumping of Mazeroski’s arm, no unthinking gesture, right there in front of the third base bag, switching the Bucs hat from his right hand to his left as he headed toward home and history.

This was a victory for Pittsburgh, but also (to employ a phrase later applied to the Steelers, who would win a world championship in the last breath of the last game of a lyrical season) a victory for the ages. This was not against just any team, or against just any Yankee team. Look at the New York lineup for that seventh game and you will see it loaded with Hall of Famers and men whose first names are unnecessary: Maris, Mantle, Berra. Their combined batting average for that game: .214.

Nobody can predict the future, not even the most insightful and poetic of writers, and it’s only fair to say in advance that this excerpt from perhaps the most insightful and poetic of sportswriters was written more than two decades before the miracle at Forbes Field. It was, in fact, written when Maz was only 2 years old. But here it is, two sentences about the nature of baseball, offered up like a Ralph Terry pitch in the ninth, for they explain everything about an event that needs almost no explanation:

“The game is as full of surprises as a mystery play,” wrote Paul Gallico. “The plot and its ending may be perfectly apparent up to the ninth inning and the last man at bat, and then with a stunning suddenness change entirely and go on to a new ending.”

That home run changed the life of Mazeroski, transforming him from a pretty good second baseman with a .260 lifetime average into a Hall of Fame immortal; of Pittsburgh, affirming it as a baseball town, even today when the Pirates hold the least coveted record in all of sports; of Forbes Field, making it a monument to the notion that faith not be in vain; and to everyone of every age who now realizes that there remains hope even in those situations most hopeless, even at the end of the game or at the end of the day, even in the bottom of the ninth, even against the New York Yankees, rich and powerful and seemingly invincible as they were and are to this day.

Maz’s home run struck a blow we recall in legend and lore, but it did something more, something far more enduring. It proved a point for his time and ours: It’s never too late.

— David Shribman is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.