Decades after a person has stopped collecting bubble gum cards, he can still discover himself collecting ballparks... their smells, their special seasons, their moods.

Born to an age where horror has become commonplace, where tragedy has, by its monotonous repetition, become a parody of sorrow, we need to fence off a few parks where humans try to be fair, where skill has some hope of reward, where absurdity has a harder time than usual getting a ticket.

A major golf tournament is 40,000 sadists watching 144 masochists.

An almost inexorable baseball law: A Red Sox ship with a single leak will always find a way to sink No team is worshipped with such a perverse sense of fatality.

Terrorism drives out all normal human activity before it, defining life in its own sick terms, if it can. So, a baseball game on a sultry Texas night before a huge crowd, with everyone feeling perfectly safe, is exactly what terrorists hate. Which is why it is so important to resume such athletic rituals - which symbolize stability, confidence and order - as soon as is reasonably possible.

More than any other American sport, baseball creates the magnetic, addictive illusion that it can almost be understood.

In and of itself, sports may be trivial, but as a symbol of the American way of life, it has enormous weight. We are seen, worldwide, as an enormously competitive, enthusiastic people who work as hard as we play and play as hard as we work. When baseball - which has traditionally canceled one day of games for huge national celebrations or disasters - stops play for six days, that has reverberations in the national consciousness.