"Life is not divided into semesters," propounds Charles J. Sykes on the cut-out-of-the-newspaper-to-scare-the-teenagers-in-the-house article that graced my fridge during high school. "And you don't get a new life every 10 weeks," Sykes continued. "It just goes on and on."

This, I am happy to say, is hogwash.

Fear not. The true heartbeat of America gives us pace, regulation and a new life each the spring. We have two long stretches of regular attendance and then a set of final exams. Some win, some lose, but it all starts again the following year.

I speak, of course of baseball. Basketball and lacrosse are more original American inventions, football may have more revenue and hockey the quickest action, but baseball is America's only pastime.

The sport speaks as a metaphor for the American idyll. Professor of History William E. Gienapp teaches a course on the subject and surely has more to say about it than me, but it seems to me the American story in miniature. Mixing the dust of the base-paths with the grass of the outfield might just conjure up some sort of urban farm, where instead of rotten apples hit with a stick we have formalized it to a cork-and-rubber ball and perfectly-honed bats.

Baseball is a thoroughly national pastime too. Those bats come from Kentucky and the balls are rubbed with Georgia mud and then shipped to ballparks in all 50 states, if you count the minor league. Folks in Lowell, Mass., and Laredo, Texas, have home teams as well as regional powers to root for.

For those of us from the baseball hinterland, keeping the baseball faith is even more important in Boston. Red Sox fans can teach us about perseverance, dedication and preservation. You've got to love a city whose stadium controversy is about whether to keep the ballpark that opened in 1912 or to build a brand-new one that, according to the team website, would be "taking all the great things with us. The Green Monster. Pesky's Pole. The manual scoreboard." To travel to Camden Yards in Baltimore is to understand the profound influence that the park in the Boston Fens has had on baseball as a whole.

Last summer I made an opposite pilgrimage, to the "Tell It Goodbye" celebration at 3COM (ne Candlestick) Park in San Francisco. The folks who brought sushi to the ballpark spent a year praising the faults of their park. They spoke lovingly of the winds that could turn a pop fly into a home run and a homer into a grounder, the need for wool blankets in the stands, the same sort of all-purpose sins of design that stain ballparks in San Diego, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and beyond.