Ozzie Guillen finally got his wish and got out of Wrigley Field, but not before finding out he had more to fear from the ferocious Cubs than he had from the large rodents he believes inhabit the right field batting cage.

The beauty of interleague play is that you never know exactly what to expect, though the White Sox certainly didn't expect to endure a lost weekend just 20 minutes from home. On the positive side for Guillen is that he apparently didn't encounter any of the killer rats that seemed to bother him more than the middle of the Cubs' lineup.

Even more positive is that the White Sox won't have to wait long for a chance to exact revenge for the three-game sweep that ate into their first-place margin. They'll host the Cubs for another three-game series at their more pristine ballpark on the less pristine south side of Chicago this weekend.

This was always the kind of scenario that commissioner Bud Selig dreamed of when he came up with the plan to help save baseball by having teams in the National League play teams in the American League in regular-season games that count.

The White Sox and Cubs weren't going to meet in any other way, not with the pathetic history of the Cubs in postseason and the almost equally poor record of the White Sox. The odds of that happening are still far greater than something that would have once seemed almost as improbable — both teams leading their divisions when they met for the first time this year.

Indeed, interleague play has done just what Selig envisioned when the grand experiment began 11 years ago with baseball still trying to find its footing after the 1994 player strike. It's fueled a few nice rivalries, given fans in each league a chance to see players they might only watch on television otherwise, and added some spice to an interminably long season.

In places like Chicago and New York, it's been much more.

The fans, of course, were always going to be in it. They paid big money in a bad economy to pack Wrigley Field to shout insults at the White Sox, celebrate the 14th win in a row for the Cubs at home, and fantasize about doing it against the same team for even bigger stakes in October.

The fact that the player everybody loves to hate plays for the White Sox was just an added bonus.

"They're idiots," A.J. Pierzynski told the Chicago Sun-Times after fans directed some profane chants in his direction in Saturday's game. "It's like what (former Cub manager) Lee Elia said: 'Eighty-five percent of the people work, the other (bleeps) come out here.'"

The managers were enjoying themselves, too. Guillen especially, who started things off by proclaiming his hatred of all things Wrigley, then suggested his team was at a two-player disadvantage because it lost its designated hitter and had pitchers who had no clue about what to do when they got to the plate.

Best of all, the players themselves seemed to understand the passion generated for the games.

"Every time I go to U.S. Cellular, or Comiskey, or whatever is the name of the ballpark, people start screaming at you, calling you all kinds of things," Cubs pitcher Carlos Zambrano said. "That's good. Sometimes I'm in the outfield and they say bad words. I say, 'I'm going to show him on the mound' That's kind of like the good feelings between the Cubs and the Sox."

If only all interleague series were the same.

While the Cubs and White Sox played intense games before frenzied crowds, the San Francisco Giants were in Kansas City for some reason in a series that matched two pitiful teams with nothing in common other than both play in the major leagues. Things weren't that much better in San Diego, where the Padres hosted Detroit, or in Oakland where the A's played the Marlins.

In Minnesota, the Arizona Diamondbacks lost a game when Conor Jackson lost a ball in the white-ceilinged dome the likes of which they've never seen before that masquerades as a baseball field.

And about the only good thing that came out of Cleveland traveling to Los Angeles to play the Dodgers before more no-shows than fans was that announcer Vin Scully could throw out this line after the Indians had a runner thrown out at the plate to end the fifth inning.

"The Dodgers circled the wagons and got away with it," Scully said.

Even the Cubs could be complaining about having to play the White Sox, though they weren't about to after sweeping them. But having to play a first-place team six times while your closest division rival (St. Louis) gets to play a last-place team six times in interleague play hardly seems fair even if the Cardinals lost the first three to the Royals.

Certainly, interleague isn't perfect and it can be unfair. Baseball traditionalists still hate it, and for the fans of some teams it's not even much fun.

But for the Cubs and White Sox on two weekends in June, it's about as good as it can get.

Tim Dahlberg is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at tdahlberg@ap.org