MLB

Dream finish is Swisher’s nightmare

ANAHEIM, Calif. — Here is when baseball is as beautiful as a sunset on the Pacific Coast Highway, as breathtaking as your first view from the top of the Empire State Building. Here, in the ninth inning of a baseball game that only means everything to two baseball teams, two cities, two coasts.

Here, on a pitcher’s mound, is Brian Fuentes.

And here, 60 feet and 6 inches away, is Nick Swisher.

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“The crowd is going crazy, the game is on the line, you hear your teammates yelling for you and his teammates yelling for him,” Swisher said a bit later. “I mean, this is the only thing you dream about as a kid, right?”

“Somehow,” Fuentes said, “you have to try to stay relaxed. And just make a pitch.”

That’s all he needed to do now. Simple game. Simple duty. Make a pitch. Make a pitch to Swisher, a 3-and-2 count, the bases loaded, Angels leading 7-6. Make a pitch and maybe you get to buy your team another few days worth of baseball season. Make a pitch and hand out boarding passes to LaGuardia. Make a pitch and listen to the sound of 45,113 voices crashing into each other and spilling out all over Orange County.

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Or make another kind of pitch, and maybe your season is over. And even in a place where it’s sunny 300 days a year, nobody wants to see winter arrive earlier than it has to.

“After everything,” Swisher said, “we still have a shot. And I have the bat in my hands.”

After everything: After the Angels wiggled out of trouble in the top of the first and then roared to a 4-0 lead before Yankees starter A.J. Burnett recorded his first out. After John Lackey had thrown the Yankees’ bats into a wood chipper for six innings. After the Yankees figured out a way to push the Angels to the brink anyway, stuck a six spot on the board in the seventh.

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After the Angels, finally, proved their collective spine is as steely as we’d been led to believe, answering with three of their own in the bottom of the seventh, and after Jeff Weaver, their would-be Game 7 starter, came in and shut the Yankees down in the eighth, and after Joe Girardi and Mike Scioscia engaged in a new Olympic Demonstration Sport called Over-Managing Ping Pong.

After all of that . . .

“Not exactly the way I drew it up,” Fuentes admitted.

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Fuentes already had turned Game 2 into an unwanted adventure for the Angels, serving up a game-tying homer to Alex Rodriguez, and so it was with that memory fresh in his mind that Scioscia wiggled four fingers and called for Fuentes to walk Rodriguez intentionally after Fuentes had breezed through the first two outs of the ninth.

Fuentes wanted to pitch to Rodriguez. Scioscia had seen the movie already. He knew how it ends. “In that situation,” he said, “you just want to keep Alex in the park.”

Beautiful. And breathtaking. Beautiful: Whe crowd at Angels Stadium rose as one, screamed as one, pleaded as one, begged as one. Breathtaking: Fuentes promptly walked Hideki Matsui. And then hit Robinson Cano. And then got ahead of Swisher 0-and-2, before allowing Swisher, hitting .107 in the playoffs, battled back.

Three-and-two. The crowd wasn’t sure whether to shout or have a nervous breakdown, so it sounded like it had a little of both.

Fuentes: “I lock the runners out of my mind. I block the crowd noise out. I stay relaxed, and make a pitch.”

Swisher: “I want a ball I can hit back up the middle. I just want to tie the game. If he wants to walk me, I’ll let him walk me, but I knew he had to throw a fastball.”

He threw a fastball. Swisher saw it fine. He put a good swing on it. Just not good enough. “Somehow,” Fuentes said, “it worked.”

And as it soared over the infield, Angel Stadium could breathe again. Erick Aybar settled under it, used two hands, squeezed. Angels 7, Yankees 6. Baseball lives in California for at least another day. Beautiful.

Breathtaking.

michael.vaccaro@nypost.com