NEW YORK -- For most New Yorkers, the World Series is a four-hour diversion. To the men and women who earn their pay at Ground Zero, it's a diversion that doesn't last long enough.

Inside Brady's Tavern, it's quiet. Strangely quiet for Game Two. There's an empty seat at the end of the bar, the seat closest to the TV. Jon sat there on Saturday night, with a glass of whiskey and his gas mask resting on the bar. The place was bustling then, as recovery workers watched Curt Schilling mystify their beloved Yankees in Game One.

Jon's hands trembled. They were numbingly cold, white and pale. It was 8:15, a couple minutes after Mike Mussina threw the first pitch. Jon, a firefighter who preferred not to give his full name because he was drinking on the clock, said he arrived for work at 4:45 p.m. and would leave at 6 a.m., his normal shift. Outside, a Saturday night unwrapped as usual. People in Halloween costumes hurried off to parties. Twentysomethings rushed to trendy TriBeCa bars. Movie lines thickened with dates and couples and friends.

Jon spent his Saturday night looking for severed limbs. A credit card. Maybe a shoe. Anything that would help identify the more than 4,000 people still missing in what remains of the crumbled World Trade Center towers, toppled nearly seven weeks ago.

A couple of long steps from Brady's, here at Murray and West Broadway, is a chain-link fence that seems endless. Covered in green plastic sheets, it is meant to keep tourists from gawking at the scene of the largest disaster in modern U.S. history.

There is no perfect pattern to the fence's outline. It is neither a circle nor an oval. It frames the disaster much in the same way a coroner outlines a body with chalk.

'This isn't about the Yankees anymore. It's about America'

So leave Brady's and follow the Green Fence to the right, to Greenwich and Murray, and there it is. Or, really, there it was. What remains now of the World Trade Center is a gray mass of dust and steel, approximately 1.2 million tons of it. Its sheer proportion to the surrounding areas is an enormity television cameras can’t capture.

People come close. Rarely do they come alone. Crouching down to see through a peephole in the Green Fence, where bright lights illuminate the skeletons of buildings once so tall, it is not a sight to be seen alone. Hands are held. Arms wrap around the other. People are still and silent.

Radios and TVs are banned from Ground Zero, because officials believe they are a distraction from the grim work at hand. But walk around the grounds, follow the Green Fence, and talk to the diehard Yankee fans who spent their World Series nights raking and combing and digging here, and it's clear how impossible it is to focus on anything but the task at hand.

A distraction, perhaps, is just what everybody needs.

George Reys, a police officer, helps guard this entrance. He's neither a Yankee fan nor a Diamondbacks fan. All he wants to do is talk about his sorry Jets, even if they won Sunday. But he's working with four other officers, who are all rooting for the Yankees, so every half-hour or so he runs through the biting wind to his car for an update.

"1-0. Johnson's got a no-hitter through three."

"No! How? Arrgh ..."

Follow the fence up the street and a block to the right, where Chambers meets the West Side Highway, and there is St. John's Hospital, a haven for rescue workers. Only a badge gets you in, and inside the game is on one of seven TVs in a huge mess hall. There are plush leather couches. Massage tables. Four Sony PlayStations. Recliners. Four computers with high-speed Internet access.

Inside, weary investigators sit and watch. Or eat and watch. Or rest and watch. Not much is said.

Stan Jablonka, a 22-year-old National Guardsman, patrols outside St. John's. "Can't let you in," he says. "If I could let people in I'd have about 10 girlfriends by now."

When he's not guarding green fences surrounding terrorist attacks, Jablonka is a pitcher at Western Connecticut State, with an 89 mph fastball and the promise of a tryout with the Mets in the spring. He was enjoying his fall semester until Sept. 11 pulled him into duty. He has worked 11-to-11 shifts for five weeks in a row now.

Across the street is a police van with a portable TV someone spent $90 for.

"Is it still 1-0?" Jablonka asks.

Yup.

"Well, see what they've got when they come here."

Schilling says the crowd here won't bother him.

"Ha! This isn't about the Yankees anymore. It's about America. We'll get three in a row."

Walk back around the Green Fence and there are three police officers -- two men and a woman -- standing at Greenwich and Chambers. They say they don't want their names used. "Just call us 4-1 officers from the Bronx," one says. "And you can tell by that we're Yankee fans."

They stand next to a van with its radio turned up. The score is now 4-1.

"If we get down by five, we're in trouble."

"When we facing Schilling again?"

"Game Five."

"It'll be 2-2 by then, and ..."

It could be any sports conversation. By any group of people. But these people talk through gas masks, and behind them a stream of trucks make a slow exit from Ground Zero filled with beams and mass and toxic waste.

The work has just begun

Brady's is closed, so we move on to Dakota Roadhouse down the street. As we walk in, four firemen put down their beers and put on their navy and gold overcoats. "We just got done with our break," one says. "And would you look at these damn Yankees? Losing again," says another.

Three leave out the door. One man stays behind. "I wish I could talk," he adds. "This past half hour, watching the Yankees get their butts kicked. See, it was the highlight of my week."

But it's only Sunday. The week has just begun.

"You're right," he says, one foot out the door. "And here I go again."

Seth Wickersham writes for ESPN The Magazine. E-mail him at seth.wickersham@espnmag.com.