This was the only way the magical 2007 Major League Baseball regular season could end, really. A year that has given us seemingly every major milestone possible, electric individual performances and classic pennant races now comes down to game No. 163, between San Diego and Colorado, at 7:37 p.m. ET Monday at Colorado's Coors Field.

The Phillies somehow emerged as the National League East champion after an incredible comeback from seven games down with 17 games to go, and now wait to see which of those two teams will win the Wild Card and be the opponent in Wednesday's opener of their NL Division Series. But the Phillies and their fans aren't the only ones interested in this. Everyone will be watching around baseball.

It is that kind of a matchup, that kind of a spectacular finish to the year we won't ever forget. Jake Peavy, the frontrunner for the NL's Cy Young Award, will start this game for the Padres. He will be facing the hottest offense in baseball, and indeed the Rockies' only loss in their past 14 games came at the hands of the reigning Cy Young winner, Arizona's Brandon Webb on Friday night.

It will be the first Monday "play-in" game in the Majors since 1999, when the Mets beat the Reds, 5-0, to advance to the NLDS against Arizona and eventually to the NL Championship Series against Atlanta. Fans can see Monday's game live on TBS or live over their computers with MLB.TV. It will be "bonus baseball," which seems only fitting for fans who helped set another overall attendance record in addition to wrecking overall traffic and ticketing records at MLB.com and the 30 official team sites.

The game will be played in Denver because the Rockies won one of a series of coin flips recently conducted to determine possible tiebreaker sites. When Sunday's games began, there was still the possibility of a four-team tiebreaker scenario, which would have lasted through Wednesday. That scenario dissolved when the Phillies won and the Mets lost, meaning the former was division champ and the latter was amazingly done, just like that.

"We got a good break -- this crowd, the game and everything, it was big to be a part of it," said Colorado's Brad Hawpe, who had an RBI double and later a two-run double that accounted for the final margin of victory in Sunday's 4-3 victory over the Diamondbacks. "At the end of the year, you've either got to do it or you go home. I was fortunate to come through at times, but there's nothing to do but just go out and try to and win a game."

Spoken like a true one-game-at-a-time survivor. What a scene there was in Denver, where it ordinarily might have been a day to focus only on a huge Broncos game at NFL champion Indianapolis. Coors Field was a madhouse, and it would have been normal for manager Clint Hurdle and his players to mingle with fans and sign autographs and distribute jerseys just because of Fan Appreciation Day. But this had an extraordinary feel. Everyone realized, however, that nothing has been clinched yet.

Josh Fogg will start game No. 163 against the Padres. He is 1-1 against them this season, and has won some big games, including one at New York and one at Los Angeles during this sizzling Rockies run. Peavy is typically tough for the Rockies to beat. Colorado is 61-52 all-time at home against San Diego, and 5-4 against the Padres in 2007. Now it comes down to one more game -- with no scoreboard-watching this time, no other clubs to possibly get in your way except the one on the field.

There are plenty of examples of tiebreaker games in Major League history, and it's just surprising that this will be the first one of this decade of parity. In 1998, the Cubs beat the Giants, 5-3, at Wrigley Field to secure an NLDS berth against the Braves. It was a quick three-and-out for Chicago in that subsequent series, but former Cubs first baseman Mark Grace remembers the thrill of that play-in game.

"I remember never being more nervous in my life," said Grace, who caught the last out of that game, a popup by Joe Carter. "I was more nervous that night than when my children were born. When you talk about must-win, that was the epitome of must-win. Michael Jordan threw out the first pitch and hung out in our dugout for a while before the game. I rubbed up against him trying to get some superstar luck off him. I've never heard a place that loud, and that includes [Phoenix] during the 2001 World Series."

The first divisional, one-game playoff was in Boston on Oct. 2, 1978. Bucky "*%#&#@" Dent hit an improbable homer that gave the Yankees a 5-4 victory, completing their comeback from a 14-game deficit in mid-July.

The other most famous tiebreaker action in Major League history resulted in Bobby Thomson's "Shot Heard 'Round The World" in 1951. The New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers had identical 96-58 records to lead the eight-team National League after that final Sunday, and they played a best-of-three "playoff" series so that the winner could meet the Yankees in the World Series.

The Giants won the first game in Brooklyn, 3-1. Clem Labine dominated the next day at the Polo Grounds as the Dodgers tied it up with a 10-0 win. That Wednesday then went down forever in baseball history. Brooklyn took a 4-1 lead into the bottom of the ninth, the Giants cut it to 4-2, and then Thomson stepped up to face reliever Ralph Branca with two on, and Russ Hodges provided the immortal call at 3:58 p.m. ET:

"Bobby Thomson up there swinging.... Bobby batting at .292. Branca pitches and Bobby takes a strike call on the inside corner. [Whitey] Lockman without too big of a lead at second but he'll be running like the wind if Thomson hits one.

"Branca throws ... there's a long drive ... it's gonna be, I believe . . .'

"... the Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!" That phrase was uttered eight times.

Hurdle and the Rockies would love to see that kind of home cooking on Monday.

"I looked at the scoreboard 3,482 times. I remember all the balls and the strikes. It was sick," Hurdle said after Sunday's victory. How did he feel? "Fantastic. This month of September has been like a parent sending your kids out to the backyard and watch them play. You get real proud of them. The way we've had barriers and knocked them down. But the way they're talking in [the clubhouse], it's unfinished business."

That's how everyone feels.