SAN FRANCISCO -- Goodbyes are never easy. Especially when you're not sure if this is really goodbye.

Jeff Kent ran out to play second base in San Francisco on Thursday night, exactly the way he's been running out to that very spot for the last six years and 450 baseball games. There were 42,000 people there to watch him make that familiar journey. None of them knew if they would ever witness this sight again.

Dusty Baker awoke Thursday morning in his home in San Bruno, thinking about managing another Giants game, just as he's done 1,415 times before. It might have been the last Giants game he will ever manage in San Francisco. It might not.

So this was one strange going-away party they held for each other Thursday at Pac Bell Park. No cake. No Hallmark cards. No tears. No violins.

	“	Whatever happens, this is a heck of a way to end the season here at home. ”
		— Dusty Baker, Giants manager

Just a World Series game. A World Series game that felt like more. A World Series game that turned into a 16-4 Giants stampede. A World Series game that left the San Francisco Giants one win away from the first victory parade on this side of the Bay that wouldn't involve any tributes to Jerry Rice or Joe Montana.

"Regardless of what happens, this was our last game of the year at Pac Bell," Kent said, on a night when the Giants scored the second-most runs in a World Series game in history. "And it was the fifth game of the World Series. So we kind of thought this was the perfect way to end it. Guys were a little emotional out there."

None of them knows who is coming back next year and who isn't. But they all know this particular group of people will never find themselves in this particular moment in this particular uniform again.

So there was something way too symbolic about the night Kent had. Two game-turning home runs. Four RBI. Four runs scored. Four big at-bats that were right in the middle of every significant Giants rally. And it was a fine little finale for the manager, too. Unless he comes back. In which case it was a fine little temporary finale.

Any time Kent hits, and Kenny Lofton gets on base three times, and Barry Bonds actually gets four official at-bats in the same game, the manager's I.Q. always seems to go up. Funny how that works.

"Whatever happens," Baker said, "this is a heck of a way to end the season here at home."

	Four!
	Players who scored four runs in a World Series game: Babe Ruth, Yankees, 1926 Earle Combs, Yankees, 1932 Frank Crosetti, Yankees, 1936 Enos Slaughter, Cardinals, 1946 Reggie Jackson, Yankees, 1977 Kirby Puckett, Twins, 1987 Carney Lansford, A's, 1989 Lenny Dykstra, Phillies, 1993 Jeff Kent, Giants, 2002

Whatever happens. You sure hear that phrase more in the Giants' clubhouse these days than you hear, "See ya next spring."

The future is a bizarre concept in baseball, anyway. These guys spend all those days and all those months knowing they can consult a little schedule in their wallets to know exactly where they'll be on exactly what date. Then here it is October, and the future for this group of Giants is suddenly murkier than that weather front hanging over McCovey Cove this week. "We really don't know what's going to happen here in the future," said Rich Aurilia. "Dusty's contract is up. (GM) Brian Sabean's contract is up. Jeff Kent can be a free agent. David Bell can be a free agent. ... So right now it's hard for us to look too far into the future."

But it's no time to be looking too deep into the past, either. Somebody asked Kent whether he could take a moment to look back on his Giants career, even though it wasn't over yet. And Kent responded with an expression that suggested he would rather have been asked if he'd like to swim back to Anaheim.

"I won't do that," Kent said. "I probably won't do that until I'm done playing the game."

Whatever happens this winter, he isn't done playing the game. If he's not a Giant -- and the betting is, he won't be -- he'll be a Dodger or a Rockie or a Phillie. He'll be somewhere.

But wherever he is, assuming it's not within the shadow of any giant Coke bottles, he won't be hitting in front of Bonds or behind Bonds or within 400 miles of Bonds. And wherever he is, especially, he won't be wearing the uniform in which he transformed himself from Just Another Player into A Star.

So Kent admitted to "a little sadness" on this night, "because it might be my last ball game here personally." But he wasn't going to wail about it. He wasn't going to reminisce. He wasn't going to thank everyone who helped him along the way. And he certainly wasn't going to let anybody in on his plans to ride free agency to wealth and eternal happiness.

"The World Series," Kent said, "is bigger and better than anything the free-agent market will bring."

And we can all say a quick amen to that. Kent didn't deny this might have been his grand sayonara. He did say he "gave it a little glimmer of thought." But this was no time for those glimmers. This was a time to try to win the World Series.

"I try to live in the here and now," Kent said, "and not worry about what the future might bring."

And then he said something he didn't have to say -- that Dusty Baker had taught him that lesson.

"I just try to do one thing at a time," Kent said. "Dusty taught us to just try and do that one thing every day: Get one hit. Make one play. Take one base on balls. Just do one thing. Add that to what everyone else does, and it begins to add up." Which is exactly what the Giants did all night. Lofton led off the game with a single. Kent battled from 1 and 2 to draw a one-out walk. That forced Angels starter Jarrod Washburn to pitch to Bonds. And one laser beam into the right-field corner later, the Giants had a 1-0 lead.

After that, only three of Washburn's next 12 pitches were strikes. So a 1-0 lead mushroomed into a 3-0 lead by the end of the first inning. Which inflated to a 6-0 lead by the end of the second. Which turned Pac Bell into the loudest place in the entire solar system, including 18 solar flares recorded Thursday by the Hubble Telescope.

Through that whole implosion, you kept waiting for Mike Scioscia to get Washburn out of there, maybe to save him for a Game 7 emergency. But the manager let his ace hang around to face 23 hitters, throw 79 pitches (39 of them balls) and get his team buried in a six-run hole.

Afterward, Washburn said he would still be available to help out in Game 7. But after that performance, he quipped, "I don't know whether they'd want me."

Well, they still have to get to Game 7 for us to find out. But you can't be too quick to declare last rites on these Angels.

Even down six, they had so many tough, pesky at-bats that Baker had to hook Schmidt with two outs in the fifth inning, 104 pitches burned and that six-run lead shrinking faster than the TV ratings.

The Angels eventually wriggled to within 6-4 by the sixth. And you could feel those Pac Bell occupants squirming nervously. But after reliever Ben Weber got the first two Giants in the bottom of the sixth, it was time for the nightly Game of Inches moment that would cause this game to make one final U-turn.

Aurilia, who had already had three rockets run down by the omnipresent Darin Erstad, smoked another line drive toward left. After the way his night had started, Aurilia figured this one would get caught, too -- "especially," he said, "with a third baseman down there (Troy Glaus) with a wing span of about 10 feet."

But the baseball barely ticked off Glaus' glove for a single. And the fraction of an inch that separated that ball from becoming the third out of the inning wound up changing the entire game.

"It's totally a game of inches," Aurilia said. "Last night, if Kenny's bunt rolls foul, it changes that whole ball game. Tonight, if Glaus catches that ball, we've only got a two-run lead going into the seventh."

Instead, the inning kept breathing. Two pitches later, Kent stepped up and finally remembered how it was he'd hit those 37 homers and driven in those 108 runs this year.

He owned three RBIs in the entire postseason before that. But he pounded a hanging Ben Weber slider into the first row in left. It was an 8-4 game. And the fist Kent pumped when the baseball disappeared told you the Giants had this one under control. "I don't usually do that kind of thing," Kent said. "Usually, we bottle up our emotions and suppress them the best we can. But we're coming down to the end now. And after that ball went out, I just felt like we had enough, the way our bullpen has been pitching."

Just in case they didn't have enough, though, Kent made sure, smoking an even longer homer the next inning to make it 12-4. A four-run eighth, capped by Aurilia's sixth homer of October, merely turned this into the most lopsided win in the Giants' 129-game postseason history.

"These next two games in Anaheim are bigger than any we've ever played, for all of us," said Kent, after becoming the first Giant to hit two home runs in a World Series game since Benny Kauff in 1917. "I'm looking forward to it."

After that, who knows? But there will be at least one more game Saturday for these Giants.

And for the manager, who said of his possible Pac Bell farewell, "this is no time to get melancholy."

And for the second baseman, who said of his possibly-soon-to-be-former-manager: "We want to win. I don't think there's any better way we can potentially end our career here."

But is it the end? Or isn't it? Sabean said everyone will just have to show "patience" while the Giants sort it all out. And patience will be hard to come by after an October that feels like this group's last ride on the roller coaster.

This weekend, though, the games stop. And then the next chapter begins. The waiting.

"I know one thing," Aurilia said. "I'll be watching some SportsCenters this winter."

Jayson Stark is a senior writer for ESPN.com.