After ten days, thirty games, countless on-field heroics, and even some regrettable off-the-field meddling with the sanctity of the game, we now end up right where we thought we might in the aftermath of opening day action. In one showcase lid-lifter inaugurating this final Olympic baseball tournament, the perennial defending champion Cubans passed a stern initial test with a solid 4-2 victory over Japan’s pre-tourney favorite Dream Team of professional all-stars. That same evening a solid but largely unheralded Korean squad representing a less-prestigious Asian pro league surprised America’s top minor leaguers, who had come to China with high hopes of repeating the single USA Olympic victory eight years back in Sydney. Now at the end of the road the fast-starting Cubans (7-1) and upset-minded Koreans (8-0) are the only clubs still standing. Team Japan (4-4) never lived up to its advanced billing and collapsed down the stretch, just as similar Japanese Dream Teams self-destructed in Athens, Sydney and Atlanta. The squad of big-league-bound Americans flashed occasional promise, especially in the final day of pool play versus the fading Japanese, yet they could never solve Cuba’s high-powered offense and thus were blitzed by a quartet of Cuban homers in their decisive semifinals rematch.

Cuba's Alfredo Despaigne hits a solo home run off USA's Stephen Strasburg in the fourth inning of their baseball semifinal game at the Beijing 2008 Olympics in Beijing, Friday, Aug. 22, 2008.

Four additional also-rans representing Chinese Taipei, Canada, The Netherlands and host China were never really in the hunt, although Canada proved something of a tough nut to crack for each of the frontrunners. All five Canadian defeats came by a frustrating margin of but a single run. The baseball action was solid and entertaining from end to end, even if a handful of vital games (including the first USA-Cuba match and the finale between Team USA and Japan) were determined via a ridiculous eleventh-inning tie-breaker—a rule dreamed up by IBAF officials on the eve of the event and roundly condemned even by managers whose teams won those jerry-rigged contests. With a single championship match yet remaining, we have already witnessed a grand final bow for the most perfect of all team sports. Baseball will now be forced to sit on the sidelines at least until the post-London games of 2016—and perhaps a good deal longer than that. And the Olympic Games themselves will be that much poorer for the loss.

Friday’s pair of one-sided semifinal matches continued top storylines involving Cuba’s offensive domination and Korea’s uncanny abilities to find ways of salvaging late-inning victories. In the Asian opener, it appeared for a few innings like we might have a bizarre replay of the inaugural WBC, where Korea breezed through two rounds unblemished and then was shut down by the Japanese in their third meeting during the semifinals. But a 2-1 Japanese lead went by the wayside with a four-run eighth-inning uprising sparked by Seungyuop Lee’s two-run smash off southpaw reliever Hitoki Iwase of the Chunichi Dragons. One-time slugging star Lee had been mired in a tournament-long .136 batting slump before his game-breaking blow. Cuba erased any doubts about its superiority over the Americans (doubts possibly kindled by a close 5-4 tie-breaker victory several days back) with a 10-2 thumping that was every bit as one-sided as the score might indicate.

American manager Davey Johnson elected to hold back 20-year-old ace college prospect Stephen Strasburg for the crucial semifinal match and that may not have been the wisest move. While Strasburg was solid enough, with a fastball once or twice topping 97 mph, he was not much of a puzzle for the fastball-feeding Cubans. The defending champs jumped out early thanks to a run-producing triple by first-base fill-in Héctor Olivera in the third, plus a throwing error on the relay that allowed Olivera also to scamper home. Twice when the Americans narrowed the gap against veteran Norge Vera the Cubans immediately countered, with solo homers first by Alfredo Despaigne (his second against the Americans in consecutive games) and then Freddie Cepeda (a mammoth blast off southpaw Brian Duensing that nearly cleared the left-center-field grandstand). Pedro Lazo shut down American bats after the fifth, as he had done in the first match, but the game remained tight until Cuban lumber finally exploded in the eighth against relievers Jeff Stevens and Blaine Neal. Back-to-back one-out singles by Michael Enríquez and Cepeda preceded Alexei Bell’s towering drive into the bleachers which opened an apparently insurmountable five-run lead. The final damage was done against Neal when Gourriel reached on an error, Despaigne slapped a single up the middle (his third hit), and Ariel Pestano (MVP of the Athens Games) launched a three-run shot of his own that barely hung inside the left-field foul pole. In all, every member of the Cuban lineup had at least one successful base knock, with Cepeda, Gourriel and Bell all posting a pair, and Despaigne’s three safeties leading the onslaught. It was Cuba’s most decisive bashing of an American team in any Olympic venue and thus also a fair measure of payback for gold medal losses in both Sydney and last fall’s Taiwan World Cup.

If Korea has been the Cinderella team in Beijing, the Cubans have certainly established themselves yet again as the most potent and productive ball club in the Olympic field. The Red Machine has outstripped everyone else on offense by a wide margin—alone batting above .300 as a team, scoring an unmatched 62 runs, outscoring the opposition by a tournament-best margin of 35 tallies. No single player has measured up to the MVP performance of batting leader Alexei Bell (.517, three doubles, four triples, one homer and 9 RBI); no closer has been more intimidating and effective than Lazo; no line-up from top bottom has been more difficult to shut down. Korea owns the only unblemished récord and has enjoyed momentum from day one. But Cuba’s sole loss to the Asians came via a single inning defensive meltdown that has little chance of quick repetition. And the Cubans have all the experience, all the tradition, and most of the best bats, gloves and arms squarely on their side. For the first time in five official Olympic gold medal matches the club coming in with the slightly better pool play récord is a distinct and almost universal underdog.

As with the March 2006 World Baseball Classic, Cuba has now already won the largest victory and climbed the steepest mountain just by getting past the Americans and into the gold medal finals. The remarkable Cuban tournament winning streak remains alive and well; in the entire 47-year history of the post-revolution National Series Cuban League there has never been a national team shut out of either gold or silver while participating in any of the five major international tournaments. That most remarkable winning string in baseball history has now reached an even fifty events with today’s semifinal win over the Americans. Of course a silver medal here in Beijing would bring disappointment and even some grousing back on the island. But no heads will now roll, or even be hung low in shame. There will be no upheavals among the top Cuban League administration and no rampant finger pointing. And there will once more be a burst of confidence and a full head of steam heading into next spring’s second rendition of the MLB-sponsored World Baseball Classic. Cuban baseball is now turning yet another page in its unrivalled history and all the new chapters are anticipated to be heroic ones. Both on and off the island all the recent hue and cry about a final and imminent demise of the Cuban juggernaut as an international baseball power has once again been finally and fittingly laid to rest.

This edition of the Cuban national team arguably stands as the most talented ever; at the same time Pacheco’s 2008 club has also been the most doubted, second-guessed and criticized squad in island history. Many fans were skeptical about this team’s abilities to survive the always improving level of Olympic completion in Beijing and live up to the standards of earlier decades. There were more than a few in the Cuban press who openly complained about the team’s make-up, the excessive training strategies employed during the Huelga and Haarlem tune-up tournaments, and Antonio Pacheco’s line-up strategies during some of the tournament’s closest games. But this team definitely pulled together, like the best teams do, and survived all the challenges both real and imagined. For several months we have been raising the cry of “where is the offense?” And we have now learned that it was right there all the time, just waiting to kick into high gear when the big games came into view and a true championship was finally squarely on the line.

It is a well-worn baseball adage that this most balanced of team bat-and-ball games is always somehow able to survive even the best efforts to spoil its beauties or sabotage its remarkable logic. North American big league fans have time and again discovered this to be the case, especially in recent decades so tainted by greedy club owners, performance-enhancing drugs, and rampant game-spoiling commercialism. Baseball is still the same beautiful spectacle it always was—at least on the field of play—despite silly meddling by non-baseball folks whose motives are the lucre of business and not the joys of sport.

That adage has again been driven home here in Beijing this week, where games played by distinctly non-baseball rules (those governing extra-inning ties) have in the end failed to derail a march into the showcase championship finale by the best and most deserving two teams. There can be no bad ending now. Either we relish a surprising and titillating storyline featuring Korea’s truly major upset of baseball’s Olympic kingpin. Or we savor an even more appropriate scenario. That would be the one that has the still invincible Cubans—representing the one country in which baseball is most truly “the national pastime” of the masses and not merely a billion-dollar-a-year commercial enterprise—putting a final and justified exclamation point on the Olympic banner they have virtually owned outright since the sport’s maiden Barcelona appearance nearly two decades back. Either way Olympic baseball itself will be the winner—for yet one last delightful time.

Peter C. Bjarkman is the English-language columnist for www.baseballdecuba.com and is widely considered the leading historian of Cuba’s pre-revolution and post-revolution baseball. His award-winning books include A History of Cuban Baseball, 1864-2006 (2007) and Smoke: The Romance and Lore of Cuban Baseball (1999, with Mark Rucker). He is currently completing work on two volumes—Baseball’s Other Big Red Machine: A History of the Cuban National Team and Who’s Who in Cuban Baseball, 1962-2007—both scheduled for publication in 2008 by McFarland & Company.