The last receding wave of the longest ebbing tide will slip into the cold depths of history on Sunday when Ryan Howard walks off the field at Citizens Bank Park for the final time as a member of the Philadelphia Phillies.
All the others are already gone, all the links to arguably the best sustained stretch of baseball ever played by the franchise. The position players from 2011, when the Phils won 102 games and their fifth straight division championship, but were headed for disaster none could have anticipated, drifted away before him one-by-one.
Raul Ibanez, Hunter Pence, Shane Victorino and Placido Polanco - the supporting actors - were gone by the end of 2012.