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The flame-out involved, as these things do, monumental hits and errors, injuries, dubious decision-making and luck of both bad and good flavours, all presented on a bed of barely tolerable anxiety for two fan bases stretched to their limits. It also involved, as these sagas seldom do, an airplane scare that turned a scheduled 45-minute flight into eight hours of tension no one needed.

As baseball autopsies go, what follows may not be for the faint hearted, but the start to the official countdown to oblivion was well disguised.

On Sept. 24, the Tigers’ Bill Madlock wiped out º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍøshortstop Tony Fernandez on a takeout slide at second base. That’s how the game was played in those days. Period. It was not considered completely remarkable. Fernandez landed elbow-first on the wooden border of the sliding area at old Exhibition Stadium and broke the tip of the joint. While we were all learning to spell the word “olecranon” — the bone he busted — his replacement, a little jumping jack of energy named Manny Lee, stepped in the next night, Jays down 2-0 in the bottom of the ninth, and promptly laced a bases-loaded triple to walk off the Tigers. Manny Lee. Remember that name.

The next day, the Jays, down 9-4 early but rallying, scored three in the ninth — again — to walk off the Tigers — again. A veteran named Juan Beníquez  banged a pinch-hit bases-loaded triple in the bottom of the ninth with the Jays down by two for a 10-9 win.

Think about that: Two bases-loaded walk-off triples in two nights, each time down two runs. The lead was a sweet 3 1/2 games. What could go wrong?

The next day, a Sunday afternoon with 46,000 in a stadium with perhaps 9,000 good seats, the Jays led 1-0 in the ninth inning. The usually reliable Tom Henke was starting his second inning of work. He would pitch 2 2/3 that day, because that’s often what closers did in those days. But Kirk Gibson hit a monster home run off Henke to tie the game. Gibson was warming up for that monumental homer off Dennis Eckersley in the World Series 54 weeks later, but nobody knew it at the time. If the Exhibition had been running, Gibson would have hit this one over the Ferris wheels. Not before and not since can these ears remember 46,000 people going so abruptly silent. An hour later, Gibson singled in the winning run in the 13th inning as the Jays’ bats went ice-cold and stop me if you’ve heard a similar tale lately.

Still, the lead was 2 1/2 with six to go. More dicey than fatal, presumably.

But here came Milwaukee, led by a journeyman named Dale Sveum, who led a three-game sweep by the Brewers (scores 6-4, 5-4 and 5-2) with a bases-loaded double to decide the first game and a two-run homer to ice the third.

Yet the Tigers were scuffling, too. They lost Monday and Wednesday to last-place Baltimore, meaning º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍøwent into its off-day Thursday still in control of their own fate. Which is when a goose, but not necessarily theirs, was cooked.

Taking off from Pearson for the short flight to Detroit — and this was in the distant quaint days when the writers, including this one, flew on the team plane — a lurch and a bang was quickly followed by a bad smell and some smoke in the cabin. Turns out a goose had been sucked into an engine and there was trouble. Out over Lake Ontario to dump fuel. A slow turnaround back to the airport, flying roughly. More than a few men were shaking hands. The writers tried to figure out how many paragraphs down the story their names would appear and the answer varied by newspaper. The flight attendants, models of composure, instructed those in the aisle rows on the method of removing the escape door, if necessary. David Wells had one of the responsible seats and his only comment was: “Holy s—-.” Others gave him a pep talk: “You can do it, Boomer.” Turns out he didn’t need to. (I know which way I’d have bet.)

The plane eventually landed with emergency vehicles flashing red lights on both sides of the runway. Everyone was bused to a building where, over the next few hours while a substitute plane was being readied, a buffet and bar were kindly set up and did great business. A player or two you assumed would favour frothy pink drinks with little umbrellas were trying shots with beer chasers. It had been an unnerving experience.

Manager Jimy Williams, whose allotment of calm demeanour often was well hidden, asked one writer: “What do you think?” The answer leaps to mind 38 years later: “There are a few guys in here looking for mama.”

None of this helped, of course. Everyone got to Detroit exhausted and shaken and when they lost 4-3 the next night — Lee’s three-run homer was all they got — the season was dead tied. But feeling deader than that.

Came Saturday and the fatal knife thrust: A 3-2, 12-inning loss in which the Jays left nine runners on base from the sixth inning on. Couldn’t hit when it mattered. Alan Trammell provided the game-winning “hit” but it wasn’t a hit. With the bases loaded and the infield in, he grounded a bullet right at Lee at shortstop. Instead of the double play that would have sent the game to the 13th, it skipped between Lee’s legs and suddenly a tie was the best Sunday could bring. (Look it up on the YouTube, if you dare.)

The call set off a prolonged press-box debate, Trammell being touted for MVP over Toronto’s George Bell in Detroit, where, the thinking was, the decision might sway voters. It didn’t. And no ball between an infielder’s legs should ever be scored a hit.

It was all doom and gloom Sunday morning and 51,000 packed glorious old Tiger Stadium to witness what felt like the inevitable. The Jays said the right things all morning, but no one believed them. Larry Herndon hit a wall-scraping home run in the second inning for the game’s only run. Some said if Bell had been able to scale the waist-high scoreboard he’d have threatened a catch, but George wasn’t that kind of outfielder. Jimmy Key pitched a complete-game three-hitter but Frank Tanana pitched a shutout to win it.

Cause of death was attributed to multiple causes: cold bats, an olecranon, a real-life scare, the moment simply getting too big for too many. It has happened to many teams, before and since, and look at the Tigers this year for a painful déjà vu of their own. It just never happened quite this badly, at least not here.