I just wanted to share this wonderful bit of prose because because it was not only authored by a great man, but it speaks to our hearts and unleashes the child in us (even in our golden years for some). I am always a bit 'verklempt' when I read this and I recall the NBC broadcast wrap-up of the 1989 World Series. I am an Oakland A's fan and the heartbreak of that series---the amazing reading of this piece with the music of the closing theme from the OST of "Glory", made me cry. When I reflect back, I realize it was the words created by A. Bart Giamatti, not the outcome of the series that struck the emotional chord. Now it's September and the 2016 season is approaching it's closing days. I think if you read it now, and again after the World Series, you'll find it every bit as heartfelt
"It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today, October 2, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone. . . . It breaks my heart because it was meant to, because it was meant to foster in me again the illusion that there was something abiding, some pattern and some impulse that could come together to make a reality that would resist the corrosion; and because, after it had fostered again that most hungered-for illusion, the game was meant to stop, and betray precisely what it promised."
--from The Green Fields of the Mind, by A. Bartlett Giamatti