My cardiolgist is getting an able assist from the Kansas City Royals.

The Royals early run this postseason featured a number of extra-inning thrillers that had my heart racing faster than a treadmill test.

I made it through those games in fine fettle. But I’m sure Friday night’s Game 3 of the World Series would have kicked up my EKG to another level. Had I been hooked up to a machine, the tape would have resembled Norway’s steepest fjords.

Late-game rallies test my composure like nothing else in sports, but it’s those games when the team for which you are rooting seemingly has the game in hand only to let the lead slip away late that drive me crazy.
I have a friend who, when faced with watching a game of that sort — especially tight Kansas University basketball games — finds he needs to take a walk around the block in order to cool off. This holds true whether he is watching alone at home or with a group of the guys at a local drinking, or smoking, establishment.

The funny thing is, it often works … KU rallies or holds off an opponent’s comeback. Order is restored in his world.

My own response when the game gets too tight is much different, and exceedingly more cowardly.

I simply go to bed.

It’s not so much the other team putting pressure on my team that causes me to fold up like a pup tent. That response comes on those admittedly rare occasions when the Jayhawks come out flat and fall behind early.

That’s when I mutter something about not watching this travesty (though my language is usually a great deal more colorful) and head to my bedroom.

My own method has worked out many times as well. The key, I think, is going to sleep convinced that KU will lose. Then when I wake up the next morning I’m not too devastated by a loss, but in those games when the Crimson and Blue manage to pull out a victory I’m joyfully surprised.

Friday night’s Royals-Giants game was one of those when Kansas City seemingly had things going its way until San Francisco started scratching its way back. With KC’s vaunted bullpen, a 3-0 lead going into the bottom of the sixth inning felt pretty safe. But the Giants scored two runs of their own against starter Jeremy Guthrie and reliever Kelvin Herrera. Herrera is the seventh-inning component of the Royals’ three-headed monster relief corps. Letting him pitch in his customary roll, the Dominican pitcher has been lights out virtually the entire season, but bringing him into a game in the sixth hasn’t always worked out as well. Herrera got Kansas City out of the sixth with a lead but he wobbled in the seventh, walking a baserunner and getting only a single out before Ned Yost yanked him from the game.

Enter The Kid. Five months ago, rookie Brandon Finnegan led TCU into the College World Series. Friday night he got his first action in the 2014 MLB World Series. Finnegan is the first pitcher to pull off that diamond double.

He worked his way through the remainder of the seventh and handed the ball to Wade Davis and Greg Holland.

Davis and Holland locked the door tight, as they’ve done any number of times this season.

But one of these days one, or either, of them is bound to falter. Aren’t they?

The 1980 Cleveland Browns, coached by Sam Rutigliano and led by quarterback Brian Sipe were nicknamed the Kardiac Kids for a series of come-from-behind wins to reach the playoffs for the first time in nine years. The Browns played six nailbiters down the stretch, winning four to claim the division crown by a single game.

Their luck ran out in the postseason, as a Lake Erie gust blew a Sipe pass intended for tight end Ozzie Newsome into the the arms of Oakland Raiders cornerback Mike Davis and arrested the Kardiac Kids’ season.

Those Kardiac Kids have nothing on the KC variety.

One more World Series win is in the books. Royals fans, including your’s truly, need only two more wins.

My doc and myself would appreciate it if at least one of them is a breather.