Rockies win One Game Playoff: Let's have more!

DENVER -- A long, stressful, extra-inning night finally ended a long, stressful, extra-game regular season Monday in Denver, and the Colorado Rockies flew away to Philadelphia and the National League Division Series ...

... on Holliday.

Matt Holliday.

Holliday's triple to right field in the bottom of the 13th brought Colorado back from a two-run deficit, and his mad dash home and frantic head-first slide on a short sacrifice fly to right by Jamey Carroll gave the Rockies an epic 9-8 victory over San Diego in the NL's wild-card tiebreaker game.

That ended a four-hour, 40-minute evening of ups, downs, fits, starts, rallies, failures, successes and baseball memories-in-the-making that had even the losing manager, the Padres' Bud Black, shaking his head in admiration for the beauty of the game.

"This is why we in uniform, the people in the front office, the fans, love baseball," Black said. "It's because of games like this."

In that sense, if you'll excuse the pun, the game was a baseball holiday, perhaps one of the best do-or-die games ever played. When Holliday scored in the bottom of the 13th -- if, in fact, he scored; there was some question afterward whether he actually touched the plate during his collision with Padres' catcher Michael Barrett -- it became the first walk-off win in a one-game playoff in major league history.

It certainly left the 48,404 fans in attendance at Coors Field drained.

Not to mention Rockies' first baseman Todd Helton.

"I can't believe it," Helton said. "Can you believe it? We were down. We battled back. We did it against the best closer of all time."