Nothing to them.

And so at 9:08 p.m., the singles hitter, and the single mind behind it, swung one more time Saturday, for the last laugh, for a mountain climbed. The man who will go the other way to Cooperstown decided instead to go the other way. Entirely.

The ball went deep to right. But the man who hit it didn't halt at first base, though he'd rounded and stopped so often in his career. He paused to point up at and blow a kiss to his biggest fan. He did not stop at second, though he'd hit all those doubles all those years, taming a Green Monster again and again. Nor did he stop at third, the position they used to say he couldn't play.

No.

Wade Boggs was home - and now he was going home. He paused a few times as fans ran by and security pounced. He didn't mind the wait. It had been 18 years. He pointed to the roof at Tropicana Field and found his best friend again. Another kiss.

At home plate, he knelt like a pope entering a country. Wade Boggs kissed the domain he'd known so well all these years. It is white and 17 inches wide at its widest, though umpires sometimes say different, to the man's eternal chagrin. Wade Boggs kissed home plate, even as they started dusting off the fairy tale. Unless you were a chicken you were glad for this man.

The joke? It was on us. The kid from Tampa, the one who didn't make the majors for the longest time because he couldn't hit the long ball, hit the long ball, the only man in baseball history to do so with his 3,000th hit. Aaron. Mays. Musial. Murray. None of them. Eighteen years of playing possum. A McGwire moment, complete with the mob scene and the fan in right field who caught the ball.

But four bases, three bases, two bases, one base, what did it matter? For the 3,000th time, Wade Anthony Boggs had proved them wrong.

IF THE LEGEND is accurate, the hitter knew his historic swing was the 221st three-hit game of his major- league life, raised his season batting average from .290 to .297 and his career average from .327759 to .327833. Maybe that's giving him too much credit, but it was a night for that. One other report: lemon chicken for dinner.

He was a creature of habit long before he started the habit of making pitchers look like appetizers; Cleveland Indians reliever Chris Haney, with a 2-2 pitch in the bottom of the sixth inning, became the 722nd member of the club. The first member was Rich Dotson of the Chicago White Sox, on April 26, 1982. Wade Boggs will tell you: 1-2 pitch, in the hole between third and short.

It started before that.

It began with a 2-year-old swinging a plastic bat perfectly level every time. It continued on Davis Islands, a mother getting supper ready, her youngest boy out back with a broomstick and a bucket of palm nuts, hitting them, one after another, into the water, where everything was forgotten except how they got there. That swing.

Wade Boggs will be in the Hall of Fame. His magic number, this `holy grail` as he called it, will make it so. As he swung for history, he had the light all to himself, complete with the Big Mac camera flashes. He'd been out there so many years in the shadows, putting line drives on the map, out there so long that he began doing it in the majors for an ancient team in a fabled Boston ballpark, and kept right on doing it Saturday for a two-year-old team that plays in a stadium where the ceiling lights up orange after the home team wins.

So very long.

And now the attention.

So very deserved.

`I finally have some meaning to my career,` Boggs said before Saturday's game. `I'm doing something that sort of means something. It sort of it gives it substance. Oh, he's been an All-Star. Oh, he's won batting titles. Oh, he's won two gold gloves. WOW - this guy has 3,000 damn hits.`

Wow.

HE WANTED IT NOW and he wanted it here, back home, where he grew up, where he went to school, where he first learned to go to left because the field he played in as a kid had a right field with a canal behind it, and if you hit it out, you lost your ball. He wanted it here. And he wanted everyone here with him. Even his best friend made it.

But then, she'd been with him all along. She was the one who called him in for dinner, then watched him hit two more palm nuts into the water. She was there the night he cried in the dugout at Shea Stadium after losing the World Series. Surely she was there the night he rode a horse around Yankee Stadium, a champion at least. Sue Boggs was always there for her son, even after she died 13 years ago, and she was there Saturday, even under a roof. You couldn't keep her away. Her boy pointed to her.

Near home plate, the slugger's wife waited. The tears were all around her. She'd been with him since high school. Actually, he was in high school, she was older, and always a little wiser. Debbie Boggs made this journey with him, all the way, up and down, to the depths of the supermarket tabloids, but she was there Saturday, because she was wise enough - as was he - to know one thing: We love each other.

The bat boy was there, along with his grandfather. Wade Boggs swears his son Brett is twice the player he was at 12, with more power. He loves seeing him grow, just as Win Boggs watched his son sprout, a father yelling KEEP YOUR WEIGHT BACK! KEEP IT BACK! It started then for the creature of habit, until the habit was hitting, until the resting place was the Hall of Fame.

There were hugs and kisses. On the field were teammates and coaches, slapping and applauding. The other team clapped, too. Approximately 14,500 men have batted in baseball history. Twenty- three had done this. The thing of it is, there were probably several ballplayers in the ballpark Saturday with more natural talent than Wade Boggs. It has always been that way, and he always knew it, so he never stopped driving or running or studying and swinging. Six years in the minors, .300 every one of them, still no call, still no stopping. Swing and swing again, like your idol Pete Rose, and your day will come.

And so it was that a singles hitter put nearly twice as many people as normal into Tropicana Field, and almost all of them came for him. He wanted to be Pete Rose. He wanted to be George Brett, so much he named his son for him. And now maybe there is another child, one somewhere in the seats Saturday, a child who saw the cameras go off, who saw the tears and watched the hitter kneel at the end of his journey. A child who wants to be like Wade Boggs. It's possible, you know. Still. But it takes an awful lot of little boy. And a broomstick. And a mess of palm nuts.