Note: Part of the following are baseball-themed passages that I have heard and read over the years, and since soccer season aligns with baseball here, I felt it was appropriate to mix my first love and my new love today. — Sweeney
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 19, a Saturday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone.
-- A. Bartlett Giamatti, The Green Fields of the Mind
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