Do we settle on a regional team because we can go to its ballpark and see its games on television? Or do we choose a team as our favorite because it has an especially appealing player, a Barry Bonds or an Ichiro?

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

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.

Finally, for all of us but a lucky few, the dream of playing big-time baseball is relinquished so we can get on with grown-up things.

But the dream is never forgotten, only put aside and never out of reach: Where once the dream connected boys with the world of men, now it reconnects men with the spirit of boys.

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

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