ATLANTA -- The month is October. It is the Oklahoma Sooners' kind of month. It is Marshall Faulk's kind of month. It is Derek Jeter's kind of month.

But maybe more than any of the above, it is definitely Curt Schilling's kind of month.

"The bigger the game," said Schilling on Friday, after painting a four-hit, 12-strikeout, complete-game masterpiece on his personal October canvas, "the better."

	Curt Schilling anticipates the final out of his four-hit complete game.

Many people talk that big-game talk this time of year. You sure don't need a full set of hands to count the men who walk that special October walk. But Schilling's dominating 5-1 win over the Braves on Friday proved once again he can hang out in the penthouse of the Mr. October Club any time he wants.

This time of year, it isn't supposed to be Guaranteed Win Night when anybody pitches. After all, Greg Maddux is 10-12 in the postseason. Randy Johnson is 3-7 in the postseason. You might have heard about that someplace.

But for the Arizona Diamondbacks, it is Guaranteed Win Night when they hand the baseball to Curt Schilling.

He has started three times this postseason. He has won three times. The rest of Arizona's staff combined -- including old Cy Unit -- has won two times in five starts.

"Eventually," teammate Luis Gonzalez theorized, "he'll prove he's human. We know that. But right now he's Superman."

It isn't just that Curt Schilling has burst out of his phone booth and won three times, though. The biggest deal is that, in those three games he has started, no other Diamondback has needed to throw a pitch. Schilling threw every one of them.

It's a good thing these games end after nine innings, or he might still be out there, hitting 97 on the gun at 2:45 a.m.

In the 31 postseasons since division play added a layer of playoffs beyond the World Series in 1969, only two other pitchers ever did what Schilling has done this October -- throw three straight complete-game wins. One was Orel Hershiser, for the Miracle of Kirk Gibson Dodgers in 1988. The other was Luis Tiant, for the Carlton Fisk Couldn't Do It Alone Red Sox in 1975.

	Going the distance
	The pitching lines from Curt Schilling's postseason career:
		IP	H	R	BB	SO
	'93 LCS	8	7	2	2	10
	'93 LCS	8	4	2	3	9
	'93 WS	6.1	8	7	2	3
	'93 WS	9	5	0	3	6
	'01 DS	9	3	0	1	9
	'01 DS	9	6	1	1	9
	'01 LCS	9	4	0	1	12

That's it. Tom Seaver never did it. Steve Carlton never did it. Dave Stewart never did it. But now Curt Schilling has.

So that makes 347 pitches he has thrown -- 127 of them Friday night -- in a span of 11 days, in the biggest games of his life. Yet he was still touching 96 on the radar board in the ninth inning. And "those last six outs," said first baseman Mark Grace, "might have been the easiest outs of the night."

It isn't supposed to work that way, not in these games, not in the most draining games a pitcher can pitch. But Schilling ripped that word, "draining," out of his Webster's October Dictionary, along with its fabled synonym, "fatigue."

"I just find it very hard to believe there will be any fatigue at this point in the season, mentally or physically," he said, "just because of what's on the line, what you play for. You dream about being here. When you get here, fatigue is probably the last thing that you worry about."

So what Schilling worries about, obviously, is pushing the buttons on his own personal elevator and riding it up to levels most of us never discover.

There is something inside him that allows him to take that ride. That something is a mystery to much of the human race. But Schilling has learned to understand what it is.

"I'm an adrenaline junkie," he said. "I feed off big crowds and noise, whether it's good noise or bad noise."

But it is more than that. It is bigger than that. It all starts, he said, with the conviction that "I'm not afraid."

"I've been beaten before," he said. "You can't be afraid to fail. It applies to everything in life. If you're afraid to fail, you don't take chances. And then you don't take advantage of everything God gave you the ability to do.

"So I've taken the approach," he said, "that I've got no idea what I'm capable of doing. And I don't want to shortchange myself without finding out."

Now, however, it isn't just he who is finding out. It is the entire planet.

In these three October wins, he has allowed a total of two runs and 13 hits in 27 innings. The Cardinals and Braves have gotten 17 at-bats against him with runners in scoring position. He has given up exactly one hit in those 17 at-bats -- a groundball RBI single by Chipper Jones on Friday that just skipped under shortstop Tony Womack's glove.

But by then, the Diamondbacks had already given Schilling a 2-0 lead, on Steven Finley's two-run double in the third inning. And once he got that two-run lead -- the first time he'd held a lead of more than one run this postseason -- you could almost see him wrapping his hands around this game and not letting go.

"The first thing that came into my mind," he said, "is: 'Our destiny, in tonight's game, is in my control now.'"

Then, an inning later, Jones' single narrowed that lead to 2-1. But the leadoff hitter in the top of the fifth was a fellow named Curt Schilling. So obviously, his destiny required him to do his best Rickey Henderson impression right about then.

Naturally, he immediately kicked off a three-run inning with a leadoff single to right. And while it sure looked as if Braves right fielder Brian Jordan probably would have thrown him out at first base if first baseman Julio Franco had been paying attention, Schilling himself was in denial about that.

"Nah," he said. "I'd like to think I'm faster than that."

Eventually, he found himself at third base with the bases loaded and one out. Matt Williams chopped a dribbler toward Chipper Jones. And that gave Schilling a second chance to demonstrate that Olympian speed.

He burst for the plate. Jones came up throwing. And you could hear the shudders all over Turner Field when it became apparent that Schiling was fully prepared to run over catcher Javy Lopez . Except that Jones' throw went flying past a clearly petrified Lopez. Schilling then gave Lopez a little thump, anyway, before U-turning to make sure he'd touched the plate.

"He looked like Fred Flintstone barreling in there," Gonzalez chuckled. "He can smell those runs. There must have been a Scooby snack in the dugout."

Afterward, Schilling wasn't acknowleding that he could smell any Scooby snacks. But he did smell a win that would put his team up, two games to one. And from that point to the finish line, your big totals would be: Schilling -- 7 strikeouts, Braves -- 2 hits.

"He's one of the great finishers I've ever seen," Grace said. And Schilling says he has learned that art form, too, from a Phoenix sports psychologist named George Nigro.

Nigro approached him last year, when he was still struggling after shoulder surgery and a trade to Arizona. He told Schilling he thought he could help him -- "and he was enough of a pest that I called him, and it worked."

Nigro taught him to focus on the simple concept of "breaking the game down into very small points," he said.

"One thing I try to use is the idea of stacking zeroes on top of each other," Schilling said. "The way to do that is to get the first one, and then the second one, and then the third, and pile them one on top of the other. It's just a way of simplifying the game mentally for me."

Ironically, before Schilling went out to pitch the decisive Game 5 of the Cardinals series last week, he said he read a column by Orel Hershiser on ESPN.com, detailing his own big-game philosophies and laying out an almost identical concept. Next thing Schilling knew, the similarities between him and Hershiser weren't ending there.

"Any time you get mentioned in the same breath as Orel, it's an honor," Schilling said. "Orel, to me, was as great a big-game pitcher as I've ever seen. I know his teammates loved him to have the ball in a big game. So to be compared to Orel is obviously very flattering."

But just like Hershiser in '88, Schilling is lugging an entire team through the postseason to heights they would have no business reaching without him. In a series that features every National League Cy Young award winner since 1991 except Pedro Martinez, how amazing is it that the best pitcher of them all at the moment -- Mr. Schilling -- isn't in that alumni club.

That, however, doesn't matter now. What matters is that the month is October. It's a great month to own a costume shop. It's a great month to sell rakes. And it's a great month to be Curt Schilling, a man who worked to get himself traded out of Philadelphia last year just because he dreamed of pitching in these games.

"Except I didn't know I could dream it this good," Schilling laughed. "I believe in myself. But I'm doing things I'm not sure I thought I could do."

And with maybe as many as three postseason starts remaining, he said, "I'm leaving the door open for more."

Jayson Stark is a senior writer for ESPN.com.