Fifteen years later, Albert Pujols is still reminded of the moment. He’s amazed that people remember and that they want him to know they remember.

“People tell me where they were and what they were doing when I hit that home run,” he said.

That home run was a dagger in the heart of an entire generation of Astros fans. It was Game 5 of the 2005 National League Championship Series. Lance Berkman’s three-run home run in the bottom of the seventh inning had turned a 2-1 Astros deficit into a 4-2 lead, and for about a half hour, Minute Maid Park literally rocked in anticipation of the franchise’s first World Series.

And the Astros were one out from getting it when Pujols launched a monstrous three-run home run in the bottom of the ninth inning. From a street party atmosphere to stunned silence.

“Oh my God,” Andy Pettitte muttered in the home dugout.

To thousands of Astros fans, Pujols became synonymous with something awful happening.

Only thing is ...

“We didn’t win that series,” Pujols said. “That’s the thing I have to remind Houston fans of. It would be a lot bigger to me if the Cardinals had won the series.”

The Astros clinched their first trip to the World Series two nights later with a 5-1 victory at Busch Stadium. Incredibly, even in Houston, that fact gets overlooked at times.

That’s the beauty of this game. Sometimes, one magical moment -- in this case, one devastatingly heartbreaking moment -- overrides everything else.

That’s my way of telling you that I’ve seen some things, and with this pause in the action and with plenty of time to reflect and appreciate, here are some memories I’ve been fortunate enough to cover:

1) Game 7, 2001 World Series
D-backs 3, Yankees 2

Maybe the best World Series of them all had a signature moment before the first pitch of Game 3: President George W. Bush standing on the mound at Yankee Stadium for the ceremonial first pitch as the crowd chanted “USA! USA!” in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, and with a nation on edge, this was a moment of almost incomprehensible emotion. And then there were back-to-back Yankee comebacks in Games 4 and 5. Derek Jeter ended Game 4 with a walk-off homer and Alfonso Soriano had a walk-off base hit in the 12th inning of Game 5. Those games ended with celebrations loud enough to stir the ghosts of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. But it wasn’t enough to overcome the brilliance of Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling, and Luis Gonzalez’s back-breaking blooper as the D-backs came back against Mariano Rivera in Game 7.

2) Game 6, 1986 World Series
Mets 6, Red Sox 5 (10 innings)

Funny the things you remember with the passage of time. Like Tim Kurkjian and I being soaked with a beer that came sailing into our press box seats when the baseball skipped past Bill Buckner to complete the Mets' comeback. That error is one of the most indelible moments in baseball history and occupied a great portion of the rest of Buckner’s life. But in the moment, he was fabulous. When Game 7 was postponed by rain the next day, he interrupted his work in an indoor batting cage at Shea Stadium to step out and answer every single question with patience and understanding.

3) Game 1, 1988 World Series
Dodgers 5, A’s 4

Kirk Gibson, the Dodgers’ rock and NL MVP that year, could barely walk, much less swing a bat. His first three swings were a mess. Which makes that one -- you know the one -- almost beyond comprehension. He somehow got a Dennis Eckersley pitch he could turn on, sort of, and with a one-handed slap, sent it towering over the wall to turn a 4-3 loss into a 5-4 win in Game 1. You could watch baseball for a thousand years and not see anything so amazing.

4) Game 7, 2014 World Series
Giants 3, Royals 2

Never mind the 117 pitches he’d thrown three days earlier in Game 5. Never mind that a lot of us thought Madison Bumgarner would go an inning, possibly two. In the fifth inning, with the Giants leading 3-2, manager Bruce Bochy put the baseball and World Series in his ace’s left hand. He responded with five shutout innings to complete a postseason in which he had a hand in six of the Giants' 12 victories and compiled a microscopic 1.03 ERA.

5) Game 7, 2003 American League Championship Series
Yankees 6, Red Sox 5 (11 innings)

And then it was over. In an instant. Yeah, just like that. Aaron Boone hit the first pitch he saw in the 11th inning to end a game of punches and counter punches that lasted almost four hours. Maybe Grady Little did stay with Pedro Martinez a batter too long. But when Joe Torre put the game in Mariano Rivera’s hands in the ninth, that was that. Rivera’s three shutout innings put Boone in position to be a hero in a game that was as tense and wonderful as any ever played.

6) Ripken passes Gehrig, Sept. 6, 1995
Orioles 4, Angels 2

“I think I became kind of a symbol,” Cal Ripken Jr. would say years later. Indeed, he became the best kind of symbol: the consummate professional and the kid who grew up and got to play 21 seasons for his hometown team. Baseball needed a hero that summer, and Ripken played the role perfectly in signing hundreds of autographs, posing for dozens of pictures and then when he’d officially broken Lou Gehrig’s "Iron Man" record in the fifth inning that evening (an inning after homering off Shawn Boskie), his teammates shoved him onto the field for a long, sweet victory lap.

7) Game 7, 2016 World Series
Cubs 8, Indians 7 (10 innings)

To sum up: possibly the greatest postseason game ever played. That was true because the Cubs hadn’t won a World Series in 108 years and also because this was a great, great game. The Indians rallied to tie it with three runs in the eighth. Then a rain delay. Then it ends with the Indians stranding the potential tying run on base in the bottom of the 10th.

8) Game 4, 2005 NL Division Series
Astros 7, Braves 6 (18 innings)

This was a 5-hour, 50-minute thing of beauty. Roger Clemens pitching three innings of shutout relief on two days' rest. Lance Berkman hitting a grand slam in the eighth. Brad Ausmus tying it with two outs in the ninth. Finally, another nine innings later, Chris Burke’s homer ended the series. Afterwards, John Smoltz and Bobby Cox made the long walk into the visitor’s clubhouse to congratulate the Astros, especially Craig Biggio and Jeff Bagwell.