As construction proceeded on the new Yankee Stadium in 2008, a mason from the Bronx — who also happened to be a Red Sox fan — found himself working for a single day at the site, and the opportunity was apparently too good to resist.

Suspicious co-workers led to some digging by local reporters who broke the news of his hi-jinx, and that resulted in a different kind of digging.

Unsurprisingly, New York area readers had things to say about the incident, as did the op-ed folks in Albany. But beyond New York and Boston, others chimed in too, such as in Chicago and Toledo.

For a while, the scene of the shenanigans sat in limbo, but in the end, the latest incident in one of baseball’s biggest rivalries turned out to be a vehicle for doing good.