Congratulations to the Tampa Bay Rays and the Philadelphia Phillies. There’s some tremendous baseball ahead in the World Series. In Boston, 2008 was a great season but there will be no joy in Red Sox Nation this year.

For me, it’s time to turn the page on a baseball season that began on a Saturday morning in the dry March heat of the Cactus League. Now, on a Sunday evening the first chills of October have arrived, the hot stove is readying and the wait for next year has begun. Until then Bart Giamatti’s “Green Fields of the Mind” has special resonance. Good bye Summer ‘08.

Green Fields of the Mind by Bart Giamatti

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.

That is why it breaks my heart, that game–not because in [Tampa Bay] they could win because Boston lost; in that, there is a rough justice, and a reminder to the [Rays] of how slight and fragile are the circumstances that exalt one group of human beings over another. It breaks my heart because it was meant to, because it was meant to foster in me again the illusion that there was something abiding, some pattern and some impulse that could come together to make a reality that would resist the corrosion; and because, after it had fostered again that most hungered-for illusion, the game was meant to stop, and betray precisely what it promised.

Of course, there are those who learn after the first few times. They grow out of sports. And there are others who were born with the wisdom to know that nothing lasts. These are the truly tough among us, the ones who can live without illusion, or without even the hope of illusion. I am not that grown-up or up-to-date. I am a simpler creature, tied to more primitive patterns and cycles. I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun.