If you were to tally up all of the things that made Seattle's baseball season a memorable one, surely the most impressive on the list would be the fact that it ended in failure.

And the second most impressive thing, of course, would be the word "failure."

	Lou Piniella's team won 116 games, but most people will remember only their playoff loss.

Tell you what, there aren't many islands left on this planet in which the final score is used with such blunt-instrument force as it is here in America. Years and decades and eras pass, and this country still happily falls back on the last-team-standing criterion of separating champ and chump.

What that says about our sense of the ambiguities of life is probably a valid question. What it says about Seattle's season is that it will be automatically consigned to the Nice Afterthought Hall of Fame, something that close fans may well remember and the vast populace will quickly forget.

And that is spectacularly unfair. And that is an absolutely mammoth underestimation of the amount of day-to-day excellence that was required to get the Mariners to the unsurpassed level of 116 regular-season victories.

And, make no mistake, that sure is America.

People have made plenty of money over the years by pontificating on the meaning of sports in this country, particularly as it pertains to distinguishing winners and losers. Me, I think we draw such hard-line proclamations in sports because we can.

We already have enough gray areas in the rest of our lives to keep a psychoanalyst in tall cotton for years. Sports, we can work through. We can declare closure. You win it all in sports, or you don't get remembered, and that not only goes for the Mariners and the Braves and the Athletics and the other playoff dispatches, but it goes for the Yankees, too.

You remember the Yankees: Winners of four of the past five World Series, current recipient of more sentimental fan-pull than any Bronx team has been accorded in forever -- certainly in the Steinbrenner reign, anyway. The talk lately has centered on the notion that a win for the Yankees equals a spiritual chin-up for New York equals some lift for America, metaphorically speaking.

Could be true; could be pure melodramatic claptrap. But even those of us who believe that, or a part of it, will strip most of the emotional storyline bare if the Yanks don't go ahead and close out the Arizona Diamondbacks in the Series.

It's still about winning, is the thing. And after that, it is about winning it all.

Nobody is going to persuade Lou Piniella and his players that they had a disappointing season; if you saw Piniella abruptly declare that the ALCS would return to Seattle for a Game 6 ("Just print it," Lou exhorted the press), you understand the depth of his belief in a team that nobody in his right mind had pegged for this kind of breakaway superiority in 2001.

But this is such a different time in sports. Re-evaluations and "expert" recalibrations (read: butt-coverings) occur hourly now. The Mariners were nothing in March, but by mid-May half the baseball world already had turned itself around and declared them the team of the season. Heck, by the All-Star break insiders were explaining that Seattle would need to win it all to fulfill the promise it had shown in the first half of the season.

In terms of the weight of expectation, it would have been easier to have been the Diamondbacks, a team that struggled through the season without ever really putting away its rivals in the NL West. The World Series to Arizona is a fabulous surprise, a massive bonus.

The Philadelphia Phillies made strides in 2001, got themselves out of the cocktail-party joke category and into the area of divisional contender. They won nothing ultimately, yet they'll probably recall the season as a step forward.

The Seattle Mariners? They won 116 games and had all these brilliant individual performances, from Ichiro, from Jamie Moyer, from Bret Boone and on. They pushed out to an incomprehensible early pace of winning and then went right on sustaining it. By the end of the regular season, they had even surpassed the victory total of the 1998 Yankees, whose 114-48 record now looms as even more impressive because New York went on to sweep the San Diego Padres for that year's Series championship.

New York, that is, was the last team standing in '98, and so everything else that it accomplished was validated in the public eye. The Mariners of 2001 will be remembered as the really fantastic team that couldn't close the deal.

You consider the pure sweat equity involved in doing what Piniella's team did this season, and that sentiment isn't remotely fair. But it sure is real. And that makes this, quite officially, still America.

Mark Kreidler of the Sacramento Bee is a regular contributor to ESPN.com.