I’m normally not one to demand happy endings – or even good titles, for that matter – but there’s something fundamentally wrong-headed and dissatisfying at the core of “Nine Innings From Ground Zero,” the HBO documentary devoted to the 2001 World Series battle that so captivated New Yorkers in the weeks after the World Trade Center attacks. Few viewers will forget the depressing climax to the series against the Arizona Diamondbacks that ended in defeat for the New York Yankees, after an astonishing pair of come-from-behind victories at Yankee Stadium led locals to believe that their beloved Yankees could take it all. And so this hour-long reminiscence ends on a bittersweet note that deprives us of the uplift that would otherwise have seemed inevitable.

The documentary opens with painful – and unnecessary – footage of the crumbling towers, and of men and women running panic-stricken through the streets of Lower Manhattan on the morning of September 11. As we pass the third anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, it seems more important than ever for documentarians on tangential topics to stop cheaply exploiting the emotions those pictures produce. To their credit, the broadcast networks have agreed to stop airing that footage except when it’s deemed crucial – an acknowledgement of the extraordinary pain caused by the replay of those horrifying images. I’d like to see HBO make a similar pledge.

After that exploitative opening, the content of “Nine Innings from Ground Zero” appears as mangled and misused as its meaningless and off-key title. The players chosen for interviews, like Scott Brosius, have little more to add to our recollections than the city’s other hero of that moment, Mayor Giuliani. Where is Joe Torre? Why no substantive interview with Mr. November, Derek Jeter? Did Randy Johnson decline to comment? It seems odd to devote so much time to a simple rehashing of highlight films from the games, like an ESPN Classics rebroadcast, when so many dynamic personalities with stories to tell aren’t here to tell them.

The interviews with fans about their decisions to go to the games – including family members of victims of the attacks – have more emotion and depth. There’s a touching moment in which a young girl whose father died in the attacks writes to Derek Jeter, and describes the shortstop’s follow-up call and invitation to Yankee Stadium for a pregame visit. I even will confess to enjoying a brief interview with President Bush, in which he recounts the advice he got from Mr. Jeter about how to throw out the first ball at Game 3.”You have to throw it from the mound,” Mr. Jeter told the president. “Otherwise, they’ll boo you.” Under pressure, Mr. Bush took the mound and threw a strike, to the cheers of a packed Yankee Stadium crowd.

But as the tension mounted and the Yankees fought back from ninth-inning deficits two games in a row, I found myself hoping for the impossible – a Yankee victory in the series. How perfect it would have been if New York had triumphed so soon after the most horrible tragedy in its history. In the end, “Nine Innings From Ground Zero” forces us to relive that empty feeling that overtakes a sports fan after a painful loss – without any effort by the filmmakers to find any uplift in a sad saga. Wouldn’t it have been better to end the hour on something other than the end of the series? The absence of big-hearted heroes like Messrs. Torre and Jeter seems all the more jarring at the end, when we’re most desperate for an exit strategy from the agony of defeat.

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I can’t possibly be the only person horrified by the image – in “Carry,” the otherwise brilliant new Kevin Garnett television commercial for Adidas that shows dozens of people jumping onto the Timberwolves star’s back on a city street – of a man doing a swan dive out of a glistening office building that looks eerily like the World Trade Center. Director Noam Murro made the unfortunate choice of an image that stops his 60-second spot dead in its tracks, despite the mellifluous background vocals of Etta James (singing “He’s Got The Whole World In His Hands”) and the “Impossible Is Nothing” tagline that resonates so well. It’s a stunningly beautiful commercial and the harbinger of enormous talent; you can’t take your eyes off it, and that’s the problem. Mr. Murro until recently was supposed to direct the sequel of “The Ring,” and must know something about the power of a video image seared forever into human consciousness. Sadly, the sight of a man diving from an urban skyscraper reminds me – and I suspect many others – of that permanent, horrible memory of those men and women trapped inside the World Trade Center who had no other way out. It’s time for Mr. Murro and his agency – the prestigious TBWA/Chiat Day/SF – to re-cut its commercial and deliver a sales pitch free of subliminal sadness.