"Maybe you heard the news. Russell Martin had his 689th career hit Saturday. It came in the bottom of the third at a sold-out Stadium. It drove in a run and gave the Yankees the lead, and Martin will always remember it, not so much because it was a hard single off of a good pitcher named David Price, but because of what came three batters before, when a man from Kalamazoo launched a ball over the State Farm sign into the left-field bleachers, the wait finally over, the history finally made, the Yankee captain finally free of the fuss and fanfare that he enjoys a whole lot less than playing baseball.

It's hard to do something that has never been done before for a franchise that has been around almost 110 years. Derek Sanderson Jeter did precisely that, did it at 2 o'clock on a sunny summer Saturday, on his second trip up to the plate against Price, on probably the greatest day he'll ever have on a ballfield that doesn't involve holding up a trophy, and one of the best sports days this city has ever had.

"I'm pretty happy with how things went today," Jeter said.

In the first inning, Jeter saw eight straight fastballs from Price, and smacked the last of them between third and short, for the 2,999th hit of his career. The crowd chanted his name and stood for the whole at-bat, as the fans did for all five of Jeter's at-bats, the place taking on the feel of late October on the ninth of July.

In the third inning, Jeter saw eight more pitches from Price. This time the last of them was a 78-mph curveball. No Yankee ever had made it to 3,000 hits before that swing. No player on any team had ever gotten his 3,000th hit in the Bronx until Jeter crushed Price's curve and the new Stadium erupted with a sound you've never heard out of it, and an outsized kid named Christian Lopez, who will probably have a talk show by Monday, grabbed the ball and made sure nobody was going to take it away."