For the rest of us, the success or failure of Netflix’s latest depends largely on our feelings toward baseball nostalgia. Count me among the believers. Only a psychopath would dedicate three hours to a 20-year-old hockey series, no matter how gloriously the puck slid. Old-fashioned football works about as well as a dial-up modem. Yet America’s pastime, however bright its present, is ever and always the sport of yesteryear, the province of uncles, grandfathers, and men named Earl. So, what if a mere sprinkling of dust has settled on the American League Championship Series in question? Old baseball is invariably more interesting than new, and The Comeback is what is presently on offer.

It doesn’t hurt that Netflix has on its hands one of the most riveting sports sagas in living memory. In the 2003 ALCS, having pushed the Yankees to the brink of playoff elimination, the Sox blew a 5-2 lead in the bottom of the eighth inning in Game 7 before losing outright in the 11th. The subsequent year, after battling to a rematch, Boston’s squad promptly fell behind three games to none, giving up an astonishing 32 runs in the process. Though what happened next is The Comeback’s main concern, the program explores, too, the formation of the Red Sox team that would go on to shock the world. In doing so, the show gives due credit to the two nonplayers most responsible for Boston’s accomplishment: John Henry, the forward-thinking investment tycoon who bought the Sox in 2002, and Theo Epstein, the 28-year-old wunderkind who took over as general manager at the end of Henry’s first season.

The series’s business-of-baseball stories are fleetly and entertainingly told. When, during the 2003 playoff collapse, manager Grady Little left declining ace Pedro Martínez on the mound too long, Red Sox brass swiftly canned him — “Can we fire him now, or do we have to wait till the end of the game?” Henry recalls asking an underling. The same pitilessness was on display in 2004 when Epstein traded disgruntled star Nomar Garciaparra to the Cubs in exchange for a defensive upgrade. Among The Comeback’s strengths is its ability to make sense of the hundred decisions that proceed from a baseball front office as winning teams position themselves for the playoffs. Yes, the 2004 Sox were lovable “idiots,” to borrow center fielder Johnny Damon’s term, but they were assembled by a brilliant and daring management crew.

Nevertheless, the show is at its best when focusing on the actual field of play. If old baseball is good, baseball condensed into documentary style simply can’t be beaten. As fans have been complaining for decades, the live game is a near-endless sequence of filibusters, as players spit, scratch, loosen, tighten, double-check, and adjust. Recent innovations such as the pitch clock have helped, but the vast majority of the contest still involves standing around and waiting for something to happen. The irony is that baseball’s sporadic “moments” are as exciting as anything in team sports. Hence the success of professionally edited retellings such as the one Netflix has now produced. Watching The Comeback, we get the gold without the dross: Martínez’s iconic, dead-eyed stare from the mound, David Ortiz’s towering homers, two outs and the bases loaded, the crowd going wild. You can’t have one without the other, obviously, but it is notable that Netflix’s docuseries is far more entertaining than a straightforward reairing of the games would be. And the games were baseball classics!

Then, too, The Comeback gives us amusing commentary from those involved. If Ken Burns’s Civil War docuseries had its Shelby Foote, Netflix’s production has Kevin Millar, the Sox’s wisecracking, yarn-spinning, likable buffoon of a first baseman. “I couldn’t run, couldn’t throw, couldn’t field,” Millar relates to the camera. “I was just a dude that loved baseball.” As it does during interviews with teammates Ortiz, Martínez, Bronson Arroyo, and Curt Schilling, that love shines through.

As for the story these former players have to tell, it is extraordinary. Down 3-0 and fighting for their playoff lives at Fenway Park, the Sox evened Game 4 in the ninth inning behind a Dave Roberts stolen base and a Bill Mueller single. Ortiz sent the crowd home happy in the 12th with a walk-off homer, and the Boston squad was off to the races. On the unlikely chance that a prospective viewer doesn’t recall the details, I will not linger on what followed. But baseball has rarely been more fun. If one loathed the Yankees — and, frankly, how could one not? — that week in October was something to behold.

Were the 2004 playoffs the last time baseball mattered? Or were they merely the last time it mattered to me? That fall, I was dwelling unhappily in Brooklyn, a penniless graduate student gigging a menial office job. As long as I live, I will never forget my exhausted coworkers stumbling in bleary-eyed, having stayed up half the night to watch the Yankees lose. Reader, I drank those tears. Call me a monster if you like, but never underestimate the seducing thrall of sports hatred. Netflix deserves great thanks for letting me relive it.

Graham Hillard is an editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer.