'The art of fiction is dead'

I got so caught up in posting the most famous home run call in baseball history Tuesday that I neglected to post one of the most famous newspaper ledes in sportswriting history, which naturally was about the same event.

Here is how Red Smith began his account of Bobby Thomson's 1951 home run in the New York Herald Tribune of Oct. 4, 1951:

"Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again."