John’s Blog

I watched the Little League World Series championship today — man, what a game! It had everything — two small island teams playing against each other (Hawaii & Curacao), the defending champs (Curacao), a comeback from 3 runs down in the last at bat (Hawaii tied it with a spectacular suicide squeeze play and some other timely hitting), and a home run to win it for Hawaii in the bottom of the 7th (which is extra innings in LL). I found myself getting pretty wrapped up in the game — was super-excited to see the Hawaii kids not lose hope down three runs in their last at-bat and eventually come through to win. Curacao played great, too — in fact, pretty much every kid on the field was completely unbelievably great at the game.

Anyway, during the game I really got excited — was reminded by a phrase in a James Taylor song: "There is a feeling like the clenching of the fist…" — and started thinking about the times when I was a kid and really felt the thrill of a game. There were lots of times when I felt that thrill, or the pain of a loss, or even the left-out feeling of not participating. It’s interesting that you don’t get many of those moments as an adult.

And with Sam, I can’t help but wonder about his times to come — good, bad, indifferent. And I’m just incredibly excited that he has all of that in front of him. Who knows what he’ll do, who he’ll be, where he’ll go. Having a baby around is just an incredibly optimism-creating thing.

Or it could be that I’m a little loopy because of the whole no-sleep thing.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 28th, 2005 at 9:35 pm and is filed under sports. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.