But baseball bounced back in the next decade to reclaim its place as the national pastime: new heroes, spirited competition, and booming prosperity gave birth to dreams of expansion, both within the major leagues and around the world.

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.

But baseball bounced back in the next decade to reclaim its place as the national pastime: new heroes, spirited competition, and booming prosperity gave birth to dreams of expansion, both within the major leagues and around the world.

More fundamentally, it is a dream that does not die with the onset of manhood: the dream is to play endlessly, past the time when you are called home for dinner, past the time of doing chores, past the time when your body betrays you past time itself.

Award trophies, as opposed to letting the players define and claim their own. Ultimately, pay them to play so that their activity not only resembles work but is work.

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.

The heroes of our youth grow old - 'the boys of summer in their ruin,' in Dylan Thomas's verse - yet we seem the same.