Reeling from the shock of seeing their beloved Yankees defeated in the World Series on Sunday night, New Yorkers may yet today deliver their own political shock to the city by electing a billionaire Republican to succeed Mr Rudi Giuliani as mayor.
As polls this weekend showed the initially unfancied Mr Michael Bloomberg drawing level with his Democratic rival, the city's Public Advocate, Mr Marc Green, in the words of the New York Times, Mr Green threw "the political equivalent of the kitchen sink" at him. Huge numbers of voters still report they are "don't knows".
A campaign dominated until now by who was best fitted to rebuild the city after September 11th turned very personal. Speaking in black churches in Brooklyn on Sunday, Mr Green accused Mr Bloomberg of insensitivity to blacks and women and challenged him to reveal the result of a lie detector test taken in a 1997 case when an employee accused him of sexual harassment.
Mr Bloomberg denies that he'd responded to an employee's announcement that she was pregnant with the words "kill it, kill it" but settled the case for an undisclosed sum and a confidentiality pledge.
"Since he's run millions of dollars of negative ads saying that I'm anti-police, and called me a Stalinist, I think I'm now entitled to quote his own words, which document his insensitivity to and disrespect of women, communities of colour and public school students," Mr Green said.
Mr Bloomberg is the billionaire founder of a business communications company who, until recently, was a liberal Democrat and jumped ship to get a nomination. He used the weekend to escalate attacks directed at Mr Green, breaking modern-day campaign spending records by pouring money into television, radio, telephone calls and mailings.
He tried to portray Mr Green as a threat to the legacy of Mr Giuliani, while playing up his own endorsement by Mr Giuliani, a fellow Republican, and by the Governor, Mr George Pataki.
