It is almost midnight on April 16, 2004.

The kid is almost 22. He is at Fenway Park. He is wearing a suit and carrying a pen, notebook and digital voice recorder, a neat piece of technology that actually works. Sometimes.

This is the biggest night of his professional life. The Boston Red Sox are playing the New York Yankees in what many agree is the most widely anticipated regular-season baseball game in years.

And, thanks to some good fortune, the kid has a press badge from the Washington Post around his neck.

Boston won that night, 6-2, in a game of little baseball drama and zero lead changes.

The writer had just finished pounding out a running story, completed on his laptop during the game and sent to a newsroom hundreds of miles away, via e-mail, as soon as the last out was recorded. The technology of it all still fascinates him.

He is in a crowd of reporters, mostly 40- and 50-year-old guys that look like his dad, scurrying around the narrow corridors toward the clubhouses. Everyone is rushing. Everyone is checking their watches. Everyone is muttering about deadlines.

This is very different from Friday nights in Essexville.

He goes into the Red Sox clubhouse, grabs some quotes from the pitching coach and catcher, then ducks out and hustles to the other side of the park.

He squeezes into a crowd around New York’s star shortstop and picks up a couple sound bytes. He leaves again.

He’s about to go upstairs, back to the press box and that laptop, when he spots a famous team executive—who, like himself, was once a sports reporter at an Ivy League newspaper.

He asks the man a few questions. The kid’s happy because, like that interview he did with Smith on the ice, there isn’t anyone else around. Finally, he has something no one else does.

Just as he turns to go upstairs, this tall guy comes sweeping by. It’s him, the guy who made everyone talk about baseball from November to February and beyond.

Some called him the Yankees’ biggest acquisition since the greatest of them all. And he was so close to playing for Boston that he had been booed that night and for the entire weekend. Weird.

“Hey, how you doing, bro?” the tall guy asks the executive.