Like many of you, I did not make it to the end of Game 3 of the World Series on Friday/Saturday. I made it to the 11th inning, around 12:30 or so on the East Coast. Turns out, I missed seven innings and almost three hours of baseball.

So I was thankful for Rachel Bowers’ piece on Boston.com this morning. It was one of the best game stories I’ve ever read.

Which is an odd thing to say. This is not Peter Gammons from Game 6. This is not Tom Verducci from Game 7 or any of the other acknowledged masterpieces of the game story genre.

But more than any game story I can remember reading, it did its job flawlessly. It told me what happened in game. It told me what happened after I went to bed, what I had missed because I’m an old man. It did so in an easy-to-follow format, using subheads and short paragraphs to recount what happened.

It’s interesting, because it violates so many of the rules I teach my sports journalism students. It’s structured chronologically, rather than thematically or in an inverted pyramid structure. There are no quotes.

But it was exactly what I was looking for this morning. Before I read anything else about the game — before I read the stories and columns about what the game meant, about the heroes and goats, about what it means going into tonight’s Game 4 - I needed to what the heck I had missed.

Bowers’ story delivered that. It was designed not to impress fellow journalists or conform to an established template. It was designed with the reader in mind. It told me what I missed and what I needed to know.

That’s what a game story should do.