The word just slipped out, and it couldn't have been more appropriate. There stood Jackie Autry, discussing the first World Series championship in the history of the baseball franchise she and her late husband loved for so long, and right in the middle of a sentence she blurted out the phrase: "California Angels."

	With her husband's hat in hand, Jackie Autry, right, wasn't about to let the world forget whose Angels team won the World Series.

And there you go, Cowboy. Just never entirely forgotten.

It's the Anaheim Angels now, but in the moments following their historic breakthrough anyone could have been forgiven for falling back on the old name. California Angels -- it had a ring, if not the one Gene Autry spent a quarter century of his life pursuing.

The "Singing Cowboy" didn't make it to the moment of the big party Sunday. He sold the franchise in 1996 and passed away two years later, having never enjoyed the moment his widow, now the honorary president of the American League team, soaked up late Sunday evening.

By the time the Angels finally pushed all the way to the top, in fact, just about everything had changed -- new uniforms, refurbished stadium, an ex-Dodger for a manager. The owner, though no one knows for how much longer, was the Walt Disney Co., and that was Michael Eisner up there doing much of the talking and the congratulating and the general hoo-hahing that would accompany such a thing.

But the Cowboy was around, in memory if not in fact. Ten-year veteran Tim Salmon had asked Autry's widow for one of Gene's trademark white Stetson hats, which he kept in his locker until the championship had been sealed. He brought it out and paraded it around the field, screaming to the fans, "This is for the Cowboy!" while Jackie spoke warmly of how the current owners have done "a great job of honoring my husband's memory" through the postseason.

Still, to appreciate the moment in its fullness, you'd need to know how long Gene Autry waited for it to happen. And more than that, you'd have to know how optimistically he did so.

Some mighty bad teams, those Angels through the years. Good players and bad teams. Reggie Jackson, Bobby Grich, Doug DeCinces, Brian Downing, Nolan Ryan, Dean Chance, Jim Fergosi, J.T. Snow -- it just didn't happen. You get right down to it, and the franchise has had just a tiny handful of even reasonable chances to make a postseason splash (and none since the dark October of 1986), to say nothing of actually running the table and winning a Series.

Autry, the man who brought the franchise into existence in Los Angeles in 1961 and moved it to its Anaheim home in 1966, suffered right along, but almost never without a sense of hope. He threw good money after bad, sometimes spending in dramatically misguided ways in his attempt to coalesce a team with enough talent and chemistry to make something magical happen.

He never saw it, and by 1996 Autry was done -- but not before the franchise, at the behest of Jackie, had begun a farm-building program in the early '90s that eventually produced much of the talent that took the field for the 2002 season.

"No matter what they said, I always wanted to bring a winner here," Jackie Autry told the Orange County Register. "The reason that we're here is that we built the team through the farm system ... I wanted this for (Gene) so bad."

It came roaring to life on a perfect autumn night in Anaheim, home of the team once known as the California Angels. The kid who pitched the first five innings, John Lackey, became the first rookie to win a World Series Game 7 since 1909.

They were probably cheering Lackey back in Grayson County, Texas. It's the place where the 24-year-old right-hander once played junior-college baseball.

It's also the place where, in the town of Tioga, Gene Autry was born on Sept. 29, 1907. Ride on, Cowboy.

Mark Kreidler is a columnist with the Sacramento Bee and a regular contributor to ESPN.com