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

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

Life is more about losing than winning.

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.

I am opposed, naturally, to regurgitating anecdote or any other form of received wisdom, unless it is characterized as such.

For many in baseball September is a month of stark contrast with April, when everyone had dared to hope. If baseball is a lot like life, as pundits declare, it is because life is more about losing than winning.

I think that much of this was running in background as I contemplated whether or not to attend the PS 99 reunion, although I certainly anticipated that I would not; it smelled like death, not youth.