The caliber of play suffered and attendance declined year by year. Interest in college football was exploding, and there was this new game called basketball.

Whatever else I do before finally I go to my grave, I hope it will not be looking after young people.

In over 160 years of recorded baseball history, no team had ever won a championship this way.

We know these men are professionals whose services are up for bid and whose bags are packed, and yet we call them our own and take personal, even civic pride in their accomplishments.

Better than anything else in our culture, it enables fathers and sons to speak on a level playing field while building up from within a personal history of shared experience - a group history - that may be tapped into at will in years to come.

It says, I think, that at root that we're children, or we'd like to be. And the best of us each keep as much of that childhood with us as we grow into adulthood, as we can muster... And even after we're past the point of being able to play the game with any skill, if we love it, then it's like Peter Pan - we remain boys forever, we don't die.

As the game enters its glorious final weeks, the chill of fall signals the reality of defeat for all but one team. The fields of play will turn brown and harden, the snow will fall, but in the heart of the fan sprouts a sprig of green.