With all the celebratory champagne uncorked, the natural inclination is to draw conclusions as to what wisdom can be gleaned from the San Francisco Giants winning the World Series.
The usual solution for many is to assume some kind of baseball predestination, in which the victorious team won the World Series as an inevitable result of a particular way the team was constructed. That's poppycock, hogwash, hokum and a bunch of other words a character might say in an old Western.
Not all lessons from the playoffs are invalid, however. Here are some of the "teachable moments" arising from the 2014 playoffs.
Home-field advantage is nice, but it's overrated
The conventional wisdom is that home-field advantage is an even bigger deal in the playoffs than in the regular season; this is made obvious because of how many times it's brought as being uber-important. In 2014, however, the team without the extra game from home-field advantage won both wild-card play-in games, three of the four divisional series, both championship series and the World Series.
That's not to say that playing on the road is the new playing at home, but history suggests that the idea that playoff home-field advantage represents a giant bonus isn't quite accurate.