A goodbye weekend for the Red Sox, and a reminder about being consistent

In reality, the Red Sox' playoff chances ended this weekend, if they even made it that far.

Jarren Duran didn’t hit into a double play for more than three months to begin the 2024 season, whizzing around the field and embedding himself in the attention of anyone paying attention to his Red Sox.

He was their engine, and also their embodiment. Prone to take your breath away or leave you sighing via . . . youthful stupidity, stressing on-field misplays as well as ones just outside the batter’s box.

On Sunday at Yankee Stadium, Duran hit into two double plays in three innings, the last a final squander in four games festooned with them. He was, to be clear, among the least of their problems. Duran’s double plays were two of Boston’s three hardest-hit balls on Sunday, and he topped 100 miles per hour exit velocity in all five of his at-bats. The rest of his team collectively managed four.

NESN set about summarizing, the momentum of Tyler O’Neill’s walkoff on Wednesday long gone after two one-run losses, the regular beating of Gerrit Cole, then another day off the calendar no closer to the Twins. As they did, the production interspersed shots of the celebrating Yankees with the unmanned camera in Boston’s dugout.

As teammates milled about, Duran walked the dugout’s length, downcast. A split second before he left the front of the frame, his eyes spied the camera, then darted away.

A few seconds went by, and Duran’s distinctive haircut came back across the view. Another second, and a towel calmly fell over the lens, the last thing visible the tattooed forearm of its applicant.

Just about a mile east of Broadway, a curtain drop.

“We were in every game. Every game was a close one, but that’s not enough in this league,” manager Alex Cora told reporters. “You don’t get wins by playing tough games.”

“The narrative of a season is [dictated by] a lot of timing,” chief baseball officer Craig Breslow told the Globe. “We have been poor clusterers or sequencers of performance.”

Words. True, but forgettable. The easy narrative is that for all the jury rigging that keeps getting the Red Sox in range of October, getting there requires force-of-nature takeovers from star-types they no longer have enough of.

There’s truth in that, but it’s a deeper story. The worst of Duran’s five times putting the ball in play Sunday had an expected batting average of .390. He could’ve gone 4 or 5 for 5, knocked in a few runs, and willed his team to a victory it desperately needed.

Instead, he had a single and made six outs. Funny thing, reality.

And thus, the only lasting memory from Sunday will be Joe Castiglione. Somehow fitting, I suppose. As the Globe’s Peter Abraham noted, a Connecticut kid and Mel Allen admirer got to announce his leaving the stage, on his terms, in New York.

“After 42 years and some 6,500 games, I think it’s time to hang up the microphone, at least on a regular basis,” Castiglione said on the radio early in Sunday’s game, millions of words deep into a tenure that began in Carl Yastrzemski’s final season of 1983. “It’s something I never really thought I’d do, because usually in this industry, you are told when to go.”

I was immediately struck by a lot of the same stuff you probably were. Like all of us younger than 50, I do not remember a world where Castiglione wasn’t a voice on Red Sox radio. He is the soundtrack not so much of specific moments as a general, happier idea of youth.

He and Jerry Trupiano are calling a day game on the weekend, while preteen me is sneaking a few moments in the garage during some yard task with my late father.

He is rolling through Red Sox with last names that are places in Massachusetts while I drive somewhere, forearm on the window sill. He’s quipping about his beloved Colgate teams as the signal dips in and out. He’s mining an almost impossibly deep pool of institutional knowledge.

His voice is straining to climb an octave, and be heard over a roaring Fenway out his own window.

I will try to echo his downcast “swing and a pop up” — you know the one — watching games for decades yet. I will never again think of a Cobb salad without thinking of that dopey MassMutual ad, which I love unabashedly for reasons I don’t entirely understand.

The suddenness was a surprise, but after finally getting his day in Cooperstown, the end was clearly near. At 77, it’s striking that Castiglione was just as good now as he’d been a decade earlier. Too often, we see the hang-on too long, the powerful unwilling to surrender the reins to time and the next generation.

Not here.

Not bad for a guy who replaced Jon Miller at 35 despite very little radio experience. “Pretty straight, not a rooter,” he told the Globe of his style, that day’s sports section shilling Boston Breakers USFL tickets — their only season was just a month away.

“He will not advance much beyond his current skill,” mused the Globe’s longstanding media critic Jack Craig in June 1983, when Castiglione was doing just three innings and living in the long-gone Susse Chalet in Newton. “He is such an instinctively no-nonsense announcer — made more obvious by a monotone delivery — that it is difficult to imagine him flowering in the future.”

Craig did note, as weaknesses go, there are worse ones. Course, he’d also christened Castiglione’s voice as “Midwestern nasal” months earlier. For as poorly as the rest of that aged, that landed safely inside the line.

Such is the nature of things, then and now, that love can take a while. In 1986, Castiglione and Ken Coleman were voted the region’s worst sports announcing team in a Boston Magazine poll. The latter retired after three more seasons at 64, but Bob Starr’s arrival for 1990 brought better chemistry and began the elevation of Castiglione’s profile.

Starr, who called the Patriots and BC football in the 1960s and died in 1998, is the one who once razzed his partner for being downcast after the Yankees’ Mel Hall hit a walk-off homer against the Sox. Starr saw Castiglione slumped in his chair and proclaimed he looked “as if he’s just been harpooned.”

By 1991, still doing just the middle innings, Castiglione was “Boston’s most underrated sports broadcaster.” He took the lead chair in 1993, when Trupiano joined the team. By 1999, Castiglione was our voice of summer and immortalized in Stephen King’s “The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.”

Icon status comes in many forms. My point, however, is that it does not come quick, nor in a straight line. Nor for everyone.

By the numbers, these Red Sox do still have a chance to assemble a run. The American League is full of muddlers, the Twins do come to Fenway for three games, and something out of the ordinary like 10-2 might just make do.

In reality, though, it all ended this weekend if it even made it that far. This season will be a high for some on the roster, and a building block for others. The consistency in construction is what will matter. The taking the good, and turning it into more.

Duran did that to become what he became this season. And Castiglione did it too, to become the sort of icon we’ll be talking about the way our parents did Ned Martin.

“I hope I’ve worn well,” Castiglione told the Globe as the playoffs dawned in 1986. “That’s my goal.”

Consider it met.