There may be someone else in baseball you would want to see heading for the plate more than this man, with the bases loaded and a whole lot of type in the history books on the line. But Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa and Ted Williams weren't on the Seattle roster for this series.

So a guy who had 242 hits, who hit .445 with men in scoring position this year -- and who, oh by the way, happened to be a ridiculous 8-for-15 this year against Colon -- would just have to do.

The great Ichiro calmly took one 97-mph comet for ball one. Then he bounced another Colon spark-trailer into right field to score Cameron and give the Mariners their first lead of a very long afternoon.

It looked like a pressure at-bat to us humans. But by now, Ichiro's teammates laugh at the suggestion it's a pressure at-bat to him.

"I don't even know if he knows there are guys on base," said Tom Lampkin. "It looks like he just sees where guys aren't in the field, and then he just hits the ball there. I was sitting on the bench when he got that base hit. And I said, 'How's he do that, man?' He's amazing."

Until that point, the Mariners were 2-for-18 in the series with men in scoring position and hadn't scored a single two-out run. But it sure isn't Ichiro's fault. He's now hitting .563 in this series (9-for-16). The rest of his team is batting .186.

Two pitches after Ichiro's hit, Mark McLemore sneaked another RBI single through the right side to give the Mariners a two-run lead. But the big news was that, as McLemore headed for the plate, it was hard not to notice that suddenly, just moments after Seattle had taken the lead, the weather changed.

Mostly, this had been a day of drenching downpours that delayed the start of this game for 2 hours and 20 minutes -- and rewarded the Fox Family Channel with the unique opportunity to follow its baseball pregame show with the heralded flick, "Rent A Kid" (not featuring any appearances by C.C. Sabathia).

As soon as that 2-1 score went up on the scoreboard, though, the sun actually came out. You're free to read any celestial significance into that you want

But that wasn't all that changed. Even though the Mariners had a brief scare in the bottom of the seventh -- when Cameron lost a Juan Gonzalez double in the sun, leading to a Cleveland run -- you could almost see this whole team's demeanor change, too, after it got the lead.

"Those last three innings were the best three innings we've played all series," Nelson said. "We ran. (Bret Boone) stole a bag. We got a couple of big hits. Then Edgar (Martinez) hit one out. That was the Seattle Mariners. That was the team that won 116 games."

They finished the job with Martinez mashing a 458-foot home run onto a left-field catwalk with what he called "my best swing of the year, probably my best swing of my whole career."

And if that swing and that rally meant the 116-win Seattle Mariners were back in business, that wouldn't seem to be a promising development for the rest of this playoff field.

For most of these first four games, they had seemed burdened by the weight of expectations they've been towing around. And the upshot was that they'd been outplayed by a Cleveland nucleus that has spent most of its baseball life traveling down this playoff road.

But if Seattle wins this series now, it could have a similar affect on the Mariners that surviving that Oakland barrage in last year's first round did for the 2000 Yankees.

This is a team on a mission. And it's been aware of that mission for months now.

"That's kind of been underlying throughout this whole series," said Lampkin. "These guys would be pretty disappointed about going home this early. Not necessarily about losing to Cleveland, because this is a great team. But not playing as well as we're capable of playing. These guys expect to win. And not advancing to the next round would have been a huge disappointment."

We've heard a lot about how resilient this team has been all year. But it's one thing to be resilient when you're 100-40 and 18 games up. It's another thing to bounce back from a 17-2 loss and win when the alternative is going home to check out the new fall TV season.

"You know what?" Lampkin said. "This team has had to bounce back in big games before. They obviously weren't must-win-or-you-go-home games. But they were games we needed to keep all of those streaks alive we were made aware of -- best road record, not losing a road series, not losing three in a row.

"Once we essentially clinched the division, those were things we played for. And I think they motivated a lot of guys. We weren't faced with going home. But it was motivating for us nonetheless. And I think that helped us."

So for the Seattle Mariners, their season goes on. Their symphony remains unfinished. And it was clear that on the second Sunday in October, they weren't ready to end it with the pounding of a lone bass drum in Cleveland.

Jayson Stark is a senior writer for ESPN.com