Mike Celizic

Sports isn’t like religion; redemption is never guaranteed no matter how many things you do to atone for your sins against the game. You can hope you get a chance to make it all better, but the game doesn’t come with guarantees.

Tom Glavine understands that, which was why his smile was so broad. Four years ago, when he last pitched in the playoffs, he was worse than awful, personally accounting for two of the Braves’ three losses in the NLDS against the Giants. He was 36 back then and 40 now, and it had been a long time to wait.

He had been the MVP of the 1995 World Series, Atlanta’s only title, when he won two games against the Indians and had a 1.29 ERA. But his overall playoff record was 12-15, and especially after 2002, a lot of people said that he was a good regular-season pitcher, but not a good pitcher when the games counted the most.

So when he left Thursday night at the end of six innings having given up four hits and no runs, it was more than redemption; it was apotheosis. He was simply brilliant, deftly working out of trouble in the fourth and fifth, pitching to the corners, moving the ball in and out, changing speeds, never giving the Dodgers a decent swing at a pitch they could hit.

“He’s been doing that a long time,” said Dodgers manager Grady Little after his team's 4-1 loss. Twenty years, to be exact; 20 years during which he’s won 290 games and six of every 10 decisions. But it was the one he lost the last time he pitched when it really mattered that kept coming back to him.

“He was superb, as usual,” said Glavine’s grateful manager, Willie Randolph. “Tommy stepped up again for us, big time.”

Until Thursday night, that is, when the game finally gave him a chance to make an old wrong right, and he made the most of it. And because he did, the Dodgers’ hopes have faded to a pale shadow in the twilight of what had been a season full of magic.

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Contrast what he did Thursday with his last postseason appearance one day short of four years earlier in San Francisco.

Glavine had pitched Game 1 in that series, and it hadn’t been pretty: five innings, 10 hits, four walks and six runs as the Braves lost to the Giants.

But the Braves won the next two games and had two chances to eliminate Barry Bonds and company. Manager Bobby Cox elected to hand the ball to Glavine again on three days rest in Game 4. It turned out to be a bad decision; Glavine was little more than a human batting tee. He pitched just 2 2/3 innings, but he crammed a lot of misery into that brief span: five walks, seven hits and seven runs in what would be an 8-3 loss. The next night, San Francisco wrote the final line in another playoff disaster for the Braves, beating Kevin Millwood 3-1.

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Glavine, who would be 37 the next season, became a free agent and signed with the Mets, who had been to the World Series two years earlier. New York gave him more than $40 million for the next four seasons, and he thought then that they would be years that wound on into October, when he could redeem himself for what he did against the Giants.

But three years came and went, three years during which the Braves ran their string of divisional titles to 14 and the Mets finished out of the money. On Wednesday, he talked about that long wait.

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“I guess it's probably fair to say I had concerns about how long it was going to take more than whether or not I was ever going to do it,” he said. “Looking back at where we were my first year here and the changes that we made during that season and going into that winter and again the following season, at the time it seemed like it was a long ways off.”

As for 2002, he admitted it wasn’t the way he wanted to go out as a playoff pitcher. But now that he had another chance, he said, “I'm not gonna go out there tomorrow and try and undo what happened in 2002 or whatever it was. You can't go back; you can only go forward and try and do a better job.”

Afterwards, he admitted that it has been “a long wait. This is what I thought would happen when I came to New York.”

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It’s also what the Mets had hoped would happen despite the evidence he gave to the contrary during his first two years with the team. A man who had five 20-win seasons and hadn’t had a losing record since 1988 during his second year in the majors was 9-14 in 2003 and 11-14 the following year. In 2005, he at least got his record to .500 with 13 wins and as many losses.

But this year, with the National League’s best lineup behind him, he improved to 15-7, and, when Pedro Martinez and Orlando Hernandez both went down with injuries before the NLDS, the pressure was focused squarely on Glavine. As the veteran of a suddenly thin starting staff, he had to come through.

Thursday night, he did. It’s just one game, but a big one. It bodes well for things to come.

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