Thirty-five dollars for a parking space?!?

"We never expected this from our D-Backs," said the gleeful attendant, trying (and failing) to explain to me why it was okay for a last-minute "5" to be penned in after the $3 on the preprinted stub.

Phoenix isn't a city with a sense of World Series entitlement. The fans here are glowing with the sheen of happy surprise (jaded arrogance and boring bluster having been safely tucked away somewhere back in the Bronx). And the 9-1 stomping of the Yankees on Saturday night sent the purple-and-teal clad faithful reeling off into all-night celebration.

But the D-Backs themselves weren't impressed. Their clubhouse was so subdued, it seemed like they'd been on the business end of the night's drubbing. Makes sense -- even if Arizona learned nothing from Oakland's sobering tale of "all two-up and no place to go," the D-Backs had their own all-too-recent experience to keep them post-victory quiet. Hadn't they watched Curt Schilling blank the Cards 1-0 in Game 1 of the NLDS, only to end up in a Game 5 squeaker?

Of course, the team that actually lost vanished from the BOB within minutes after the last pitch. You could almost see the cartoon vapors left in the wake of the Yankees' Road-Runneresque exit.

"This game will mean zero tomorrow -- to us and to them," Schilling explained. He wore a Pittsburgh Steelers baseball cap and one of the "Member of the Greg Counsell Fan Club" T-shirts that Randy Johnson had made after flubbing Craig's name on TV a couple nights ago. Ice packs wrapped in ace bandages around his right elbow and left shoulder, Schilling dripped water, not sweat, as he held court in front of his two-locker suite -- that's how little it seemed the Yanks touched him.

Is a 1-1 split good enough? Schilling is asked.

"I'm not looking for a split," he said, wrinkling his nose. A goth metal-lettered "Fear the Mullet" bumper sticker peeked out from behind the mess of dirty clothes littering his locker (rumpled shirts, socks, Scooby Doo boxers). "We've got RJ going tomorrow."

Team Mullet knows what it needs to do: Defy the Yankees' mystery math, and make the wins add up to something other than zero.

E-mail Anne Marie Cruz at anne.marie.cruz@espnmag.com.