The air was thick with Florida heat and the smell of Budweiser and Cuban cigars, but a chill ran down my skinny little spine when I watched those boys pile onto each other, a writhing mass of heroic, euphoric red, and on that day I fell in love.

Not with baseball, that came later. No, I fell in love with what that team meant to my little rock of an island, with the fervor and the passion, with the tears of the grown men and the glee of the little boys.

Those kids in the red caps were heroes, and at that moment, I wanted nothing more than to be them.

* * *

Two years later, I was a freshman in high school, and my older brother was one of those kids in the red cap. Gender dictated I couldn’t be, but pride dictated that I had to be something.

That’s why I started writing.

First for the local weekly, then the local daily, five articles a week by the spring of my sophomore year, every single one on the front of the sports section, above the fold.

Key West is an island with an almost unrivaled literary tradition, stretching back to Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, and Robert Frost, and even today it houses more Pulitzer Prize winners per capita than any city in the United States.

But to the locals, the most famous writer in town has always been whoever covers the Key West High School Fighting Conchs, so I did.

Somewhere in the middle, I fell in love with the game of baseball, its silent rhythm and cadence, the subtleties of its design, its pastoral beauty.

Somewhere in the middle, I fell in love with the writing, with trying to translate five senses into words on a computer screen that then become words in 40,000 newspapers the next morning.

But at the beginning? I just loved being as close to those kids in the red caps as possible.

That’s why this story starts there.

Every story I’ve ever written started there.

* * *