It was, by any measure, a bitter setback for Northern California. Blessed with seemingly insurmountable advantages, and so very close to a victory for the ages, everything suddenly, relentlessly, went sour.

The San Francisco Giants' ugly collapse against the gritty Anaheim Angels? To be sure. But the same story could be told about the formerly high-flying Bay Area more generally.

Both team and region have squandered opportunities most others only dream of having. Each profoundly failed to live up to expectations. And, unless they demonstrate a renewed capacity for creative initiative, things will almost certainly get much worse.

San Francisco's reversal of fortune predates its baseball team's defeat by only a few months. Up to the early 1990s, the western Bay Area -- San Francisco proper, the southern peninsula and greater San Jose, suffered from the slowest job growth in the state. Public facilities were crumbling. Crime and homelessness were everywhere a threat.

Quite suddenly the region put on a spectacular rally. Taking advantage of the cluster of computer design and manufacturing facilities located primarily in the south bay, the area often disparaged as the most "Los Angelesified," greater San Francisco became a magnet for the so-called "new" economy. An A-team of media, investment and marketing talent flooded the region, boosting moribund real estate to record highs, encouraging a plethora of chi-chi eateries, and even emboldening the area's leadership, flush with windfall tax revenues, to clean up a few of the more dilapidated public spaces.

Almost overnight, San Francisco was the place to be. Fed by its apparently limitless success, the region's hubris rose almost as rapidly as the price of a two-room tear-down in Palo Alto. Unbelievably lucrative employment was as easy to find as a scone and an imported coffee. The Bay Area had a once-in-a-lifetime chance to refashion itself as a long-term economic winner.

Yet, like Barry Bonds' unaccountably dismal outfield play in the last two games of the World Series, the Bay Area bobbled the ball. Its maniacally self-centered interest groups, and the leaders they elected, refused to stimulate a broad-based economy, housing and similar human needs with the region's sudden infusion of cash. When the new economy went stale, a relative handful of mostly white-collar winners retired -- literally -- to the hills where they contentedly bid up home prices with their leftover funny money.

Meanwhile, the local economy staged an epic meltdown. Since January 2000, the western Bay Area lost over 150,000 jobs, an unbelievable 7% of the region's workforce. That's a far faster rate of decline than Los Angeles suffered in the darkest days of the early 1990s. Industries like manufacturing, business services and trade are still in record decline. Nothing is emerging in their places.

Signs of dysfunction are everywhere. Tourism, San Francisco's most reliable sector, has been hit hard by highly publicized problems with its thousands-strong army of chronically unemployed and homeless residents. Parts of the city more closely resemble Calcutta than one of the world's elite communities. Hotels are in a tailspin. Potential solutions are stymied by the Bay Area's notoriously fractious, immature political leadership.

The region's aspiring minorities gained almost nothing from the brief economic boom. Public schools remain among the worst in the country. Underdeveloped, strikingly unsightly districts lurk just outside the more famous locales that patronize the wealthy. The Giants boast a black manager, San Francisco a black mayor. Yet the city's African-American population, squeezed by high costs and limited job options, fell by a whopping 23% in the 1990s, the largest such urban decline in the U.S.

So it shouldn't have come as a shock when the region's baseball standard-bearer squandered its chance to win the World Series for the first time since 1954 when it relocated from New York. The Giants were a good, tough team, but they failed to employ their recent success to fix their chronic weaknesses.

Superstar Bonds personifies the modern, self-centered athlete, one who achieves amazing individual feats but alienates his teammates. We may never again see a hitter rack up more impressive, yet strangely meaningless statistics in another postseason series. Happily for the Dodger fans who loathe him, Bonds' atrocious fielding contributed directly to the Angels' miraculous sixth game comeback and to their final victory the next night.

Pitcher Livan Hernandez' emotional meltdown on the mound in the series' decisive seventh game would never have been tolerated by the focused, disciplined Angel team. Throughout the playoffs, shopping center heir and Giant owner Peter Magowan bizarrely chose to publicly feud over a new contract with Dusty Baker, his World Series manager. When the chips were down, the Giants all too frequently elevated childish self-indulgence above the common good. It cost them dearly.

That may well turn out to be the epitaph for the Bay Area as a whole. Greater San Francisco now faces what may well be the most challenging circumstances in California history. Yet, there are few if any signs that its leadership can rise above petty concerns and lay the groundwork for a more just, productive society. Teamwork, commitment and self-sacrifice, the Angels taught the Giants, is what separates winners from has-beens. It remains to be seen which fate San Francisco will choose.