Overheard an infuriatingly banal comment in the dining hall the other day:

"The Sox are gonna be good once Clemens gets goin."

I grabbed the speaker's collar:

"Listen to me and listen good, you miserable whelp," I snarled. "Your beloved 'Sox' will not be good once Clemens gets goin,' Michael Jordan will never hit a curveball, you will not find love at Harvard and our lives are as mass of days pissed away like pocket change."

I apologized later. (He was a House Master, after all).

But what a naif! There ought to be speech code against such mundanities.

I, too, once believed in the green light, but than I realized--it's just a green light!

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child and I thought as a child. But when I became a man, I put away childish things.

I remember growing up in Wellesley, Massachusetts, playing and loving baseball while my bourgeois little buddies played "soccer."

Each lilac-scented spring, hope returned mysteriously, and I returned to Fenway Park. And each autumn, I'd watch the season expire on TV 38. I'd flip the set off and lie down. Summer was over. Baseball was gone. Winter loomed.

I'd be sad for days--I swear, I really felt like that. My mother didn't know why, but my father did. And he'd say, "Get 'em next year, pal."

And it would start all over in the spring. Hoping on Clemens and Dwight Evans and Jim Rice and Rich Gedman--Okay, not Gedman. Fall would then fall again.

And so it went.

In 1986, I moved to Atlanta out of disgust (my parents soon followed) where I discovered National League baseball and terrible, but dedicated team called the Atlanta Braves. They prized speed, pitching and defense. And they were carefully cultivating a crop in incredible pitchers in Triple-A.

By 1990, they had won the pennant and were the most exciting team in baseball. They still are.