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CHICAGO -- Ben Sheets didn't change into his uniform in a phone booth Wednesday night.

He didn't leap the Sears Tower in a single bound.

He didn't rescue any lost infants or damsels in distress.

But he sure did rescue a baseball team in distress. Monumental distress. Potentially historic distress.

Once upon a time, you might recall, the Milwaukee Brewers were the best team in baseball. No, not in 1982. It was a mere three and a half months ago. You can look it up.

Unfortunately for them, however, this season kept going. The Brewers, on the other hand, did not keep going.

So there they were Wednesday, their 24-10 start just a distant piece of trivia, their one-time 8½-game lead dumped over a cliff, their magical season not feeling quite so magical anymore.

And then ...

Sheets showed up.

Six weeks after he faded onto the disabled list with a sprained finger, the Brewers' ace finally returned -- and did what aces do.

He spun six innings of six-hit, one-run baseball. He outdueled $91.5 million Cubs stud Carlos Zambrano in the pennant-race cauldron that was Wrigley Field. And presto -- the Brewers won themselves one of the most important baseball games they have played all year, 6-1.

"I felt like tonight was a must-win game for us -- mentally and physically," left fielder Geoff Jenkins said after the Brewers had climbed back into second place, 1½ games back of the Cubs. "Physically, getting Sheets back. And mentally, just for our psyches."

Those psyches had taken quite the pounding lately, too, as the losses piled up. Five of them in a row before Wednesday night. Eleven in the past 14 games. Twenty-six in the past 38 games.

And as this once-beautiful season skidded off the tracks, the pitcher who gets paid to stop these swan dives was one unhappy camper.

No one can relate to being a Brewer, unless he has lived it. Ben Sheets has lived it now for seven exasperating seasons, seven seasons of waiting for a year like this one to come along.

So to spend the past month and a half spectating this train wreck, while a seemingly cushy lead vaporized, wasn't exactly Sheets' ideal script for how to enjoy his summer.

"I can't really describe it," he said. "Just kind of an empty feeling. It's something that you wait for -- especially here, for seven years -- to be a part of. And to not be a part of that, it's awfully tough. But we've still got a month left. That's six starts. So that's what I'm going to try to make the best of -- those six starts."

Well, if those other six starts look anything like this start, there might just be hope for this Brew Crew yet.

Sheets wasn't anywhere near as dominating as he was in his last visit to Wrigley, when he punched out 11 Cubs on June 30 for his last win before Wednesday. But he rose to meet a series of potentially game-turning moments in the third and fourth innings, holding the Cubs to one run after three of the first four hitters reached base in the third, then throwing a zero up there after Mark DeRosa doubled to lead off the fourth.

And maybe the biggest development of all was that Sheets even made it through six innings -- which seemed highly unlikely when it took him 40 pitches to navigate just the first two innings -- knowing he was on roughly an 85 pitch count.

OK, so it might not sound like the plot of a major motion picture when a guy pitches six decent innings and leaves with the lead. But keep in mind, all those Brewers starters not named Ben Sheets have been able to do that precisely twice in their past 21 starts.

So for this team, to have the starter go six and hand a lead to the late-inning relief crew felt like Christmas morning.

"It just settles down your whole pitching staff," manager Ned Yost said, "when your ace is back out there doing what he's supposed to be doing."

Want to know what aces mean to a team like this? Digest this: Seven of Sheets' nine wins since May 12 have followed a Brewers loss.

There are many ways to look at the significance of that feat. But it's hard to ignore the fact that one way of looking at it is what pitching coach Mike Maddux said: "I guess we've been losing too much."

Yeah, good point. After winning 24 of their first 34, the Brewers actually fell a game below .500 with their come-from-ahead loss to the Cubs on Tuesday. And that's an even worse plot twist than it sounds.

It's ominous because, in the history of baseball, only two teams have ever started a season by going 24-10 or better and wound up that season with a losing record: the 1890 Philadelphia Athletics (who went from 24-10 to 54-78) and the 1995 Phillies (who plummeted from 19 games over .500 at one point to six games under by year's end).

You can hang much of this particular mess on the rotation, which is only 14th in the league in quality starts. But worse than that, the Brewers have had the guy who began the year as their No. 2 starter, Chris Capuano, go 16 straight starts without a win, while their No. 3 starter, Jeff Suppan, has skidded through 12 straight winless starts -- at the same time.

The Elias Sports Bureau reports that no team has finished at .500 or better in a season in which two of its starting pitchers went 12 consecutive starts without a win, not since the 2003 White Sox (when Mark Buehrle and Dan Wright pulled that off). No wonder. It's tough to do.

So somebodyneeds to start winning around here. Which is just one more reason the Brewers sure seemed to enjoy that sight of Sheets headed for the mound.

"It's like the Cardinals without [Chris] Carpenter," Jenkins said. "Or the Astros without [Roy] Oswalt. Or the Cubs without Zambrano. That's your horse. It's the guy you know can go out every fifth day and eat innings. Not that you're not excited behind everybody else. But your horse is your horse. Bottom line. With the stuff those guys have, they have the ability to dominate every time out.

"It kind of feels," Jenkins said, "like we just picked up a huge free agent for the stretch."

Sheets might not have quite the same rep around the stables as those other horses, mainly because he has spent his whole career pitching in the top-secret confines of Milwaukee. But you might be surprised to learn that since he arrived in the big leagues, he has a better ERA (3.79) and strikeout ratio (7.7 per 9 IP) than Bartolo Colon, C.C. Sabathia and Brad Penny.

And he means more to this team than any of those numbers indicate.

"He's the kind of guy you'd want your daughter to marry," Maddux said. "He's genuine. There's a lot of smarts behind the aw-shucks."

Hmmm. Smarts? Does that mean pitching smarts?

"Everything smarts," Maddux said. "He's got the memory of an elephant."

Uh, hold on. Are we sure elephants really have good memories?

"So I've heard," Maddux said, laughing. "I don't really know, because I've never asked one. But P.T. Barnum said it once. And that's good enough for me."

And those six innings of one-run pitching -- they were good enough for the Milwaukee Brewers. So now all Sheets and his friends have to do to salvage their season is shut these past three and a half months of losing games out of that world-class memory and start over -- with their ace in the middle of the salvage crew.

"We just have to be the best team for 29 games now," Jenkins said. "We don't have to be the best team for six months anymore. ... If we can just finish the way we started, we'll be in great shape."

Jayson Stark is a senior writer for ESPN.com. His new book, "The Stark Truth: The Most Overrated and Underrated Players in Baseball History," has been published by Triumph Books and is available in bookstores. Click here to order a copy.