For eight innings last Sunday, the Phillies did absolutely nothing. Four hits, zero runs, down 4-0, and two outs in the ninth. The Cardinals had their closer on the mound, and everyone could reasonably start thinking about dinner.

Then Edmundo Sosa cleared the bases with a double, Bryan De La Cruz tied it, and Kyle Schwarber hit a baseball 459 feet into dead center to end the game.

Six runs, all with two outs, and we ended the game with a 6-4 win, sweeping the Cardinals. Nine straight victories. The kind of finish that had Scott Franzke yelling “It’s over!” on the radio, Tom McCarthy doing the same on TV, and John Kruk apparently deciding there was nothing he could add to the situation.

Michael Barkann called it maybe the greatest regular-season finish he’s ever seen, which could sound like postgame exaggeration until you realize the Phillies hadn’t won a game after trailing by four or more with two outs in the ninth since 1983.

This team lost 10 straight games in April, and now has swept three straight series for the first time in 16 years and is suddenly breathing down Atlanta’s neck. Please let this happy chaos continue.

Dolly Parton was 80, had been famous for nearly 60 years, and somehow belonged to everybody — country fans, drag queens, kids getting free books, your mom, your grandma, anyone who ever owned a rhinestone.

Philly got its share of Dolly, from the Spectrum to the Mann and Atlantic City, where she once joked she’d keep performing until she dropped dead mid-song, “high heels to heaven.” But the clip we’ll keep replaying is her and Patti LaBelle in 1987, two icons in enormous hair and sparkly gowns, using their acrylic nails as percussion while singing “Short’nin’ Bread.” It looks less like television than two of your aunties got bored at a wedding reception and decided to put on a show.

She once said she hoped that long after she was gone, people would look back at her career and say, “Damn, that was good.”

And damn, Dolly. It was.

There are certain signs that fall is coming in Philadelphia: Kids go back to school, the Eagles start playing games that count, and someone you know sets mums out on their porch.

And, for once, the first day of school didn’t come with a 95-degree forecast.

That matters in Philly, where 52 district schools still aren’t fully air-conditioned and hot days can mean early dismissals or remote learning. Nothing eases a parent back into the school-year routine quite like dropping a kid off and then finding out you need to leave work to pick them up three hours later.

The district did eliminate half days this year, so families have one less factor contributing to scheduling chaos.

And this week’s cooler mornings have been enough to make us start thinking about sweatshirts, football, and maybe opening a window at night. But next week’s forecast has temperatures creeping back toward the 90s, so it looks like we still have a wait.

It has been nearly 20 years since Nicolas Cage last went hunting for treasure, which is an absurd amount of time to leave a man who once stole the Declaration of Independence without another important American document to steal.

But National Treasure 3 is finally real. Director Jon Turteltaub broke the news at Philadelphia’s first National Treasure Weekend. (Where else should this announcement happen?)

The original movie filmed some of its most memorable scenes here, and Philadelphia has spent the two decades since happily accepting National Treasure into the local canon. Benjamin Franklin signed the Declaration of Independence, and Nicolas Cage stole it.

There’s a script, Cage is expected back, and Turteltaub says they’re trying to bring back the rest of the cast.

No word yet on whether Philly makes it into the third movie, but after hosting an entire weekend in its honor, we better get robbed again.

At this point, a national food publication naming Philadelphia restaurants among the best in the country is less breaking news and more a recurring calendar event.

This time it’s Bon Appétit, which put Honeysuckle and Sao on its list of 19 best new restaurants in America. They join spots in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and the other cities we’re apparently required to compete with every time somebody makes one of these lists.

We could pretend to be surprised, but both restaurants already have plenty of hardware — and attention. Honeysuckle is Michelin-recommended, while Sao comes from Phila and Rachel Lorn, whose first restaurant, Mawn, remains one of the hardest tables to get in town.

So yes, another national publication has discovered that Philadelphia is very good at restaurants. We’ll take the nod and act appropriately impressed.

Remember the guy in the creepy Halloween mask who spent a morning terrorizing people around City Hall? Well, he made it all the way to Las Vegas before the U.S. Marshals caught up with him.

The whole thing was bizarre even by Philly standards: A man in a cracked-doll mask allegedly spent half an hour chasing and scaring people, including asking one jogger if she was “ready to die.” One woman was injured trying to get away. Then he apparently packed his bags and left town.

There are plenty of characters around City Hall already, and we did not need one who looked like he wandered off the set of a low-budget horror movie.