Turn off the porch light, the Twins won't be returning home to the Metrodome any time soon.

It was as if the clock struck midnight while the team was in Anaheim. The coach turned back into a pumpkin. The beautiful gown turned back into rags. And LaTroy Hawkins turned back into, well, LaTroy Hawkins.

It just goes to show that not all fairy tales have happy endings.

"No, not all of them," said Eddie Guardado, who took the loss hard. "It's tough to swallow right now. We'll take our time off, spend time with our families and regroup."

This was not the preferred ending for the legions of Minnesota fans that were sure their team was going to make the ultimate comeback from near nonexistence to the top of the baseball world. For them, it must seem as if there is unfinished business.

The Twins feel that way, too. A season that was one long highlight film should not end with a blooper reel.

"I'm already thinking about spring training," David Ortiz said as he sat slumped in front of his locker. "Now we got a little playoff experience."

But for the moment, Bud Selig must be smiling. He will be spared the embarrassment of presenting a championship trophy to the team he led the charge to destroy. And we won't hear from Carl Pohlad again until he is visited by the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future Dec. 24.

"There's this disappointment we all share right now," said Dustan Mohr. "We worked so hard to get to this point and it didn't work out for us."

Soon, the Twins will be able to retreat into the accomplishments of 2002. They will realize they beat the system, not only by surviving but also by thriving in a league that tried to get rid of them. They foiled their owner's plan to take the money and run. Or take the money and slither, to be more accurate.

But that point is a ways off. Right now they are hurting after their poor showing against the Disney Angels.

"It's tough right now," said Ron Gardenhire, his eyes red. "If we can get through the next couple of days, we'll be all right. We just couldn't stop them today. We couldn't stop them."

The bullpen, teetering on insolvency the whole series, imploded in Game 5 against the relentless Angels. The Twins finally had scratched for some runs. When they went up 5-3 in the top of the seventh, to a man they were thinking about bringing the series back to the Metrodome.

"We're thinking, all right, we're going home!" said Doug Mientkiewicz.

One-half inning and 10 runs later, they knew it was curtains.

"I think our bullpen ran out of gas," Mientkiewicz said in a huge understatement. "We've been depending on them all year."

But even in defeat there was a certain confidence among the players. They are certain this was no one-shot wonder. They know they are good and they know they should stay good if the team remains together.

To that end, the players should get together over the winter and light a few candles with the hope of finally getting a new owner. Nothing is sure under the current regime. Remember, Pohlad tried to sell them down the river once already.

"After what happened last winter, we don't count our chickens before they hatch," Mientkiewicz said. "But teammates like this don't come around every day. We just kept turning heads all year."

The bottom line is that, even though Twins fans are stunned that they won't see their heroes again until 2003, they got a summer's worth of great entertainment. The team was fun to watch. It played well. And it ignited baseball the fever in Minnesota that had been missing for a decade.

This fairy tale did not have that lump-in-the-throat, heavenly choir-singing happy ending. But it was an interesting story nevertheless. The beginning was horrible. The middle chapters were fabulous. Only at the end did things go wrong.

All in all, not bad.

Wait till next year.