Yesterday was one of those near-perfect days. It was sunny with a glowing blue sky. Warm, but not too warm. Crisp morning air, good sleeping weather. And I won a Cider Mill pie in a pie auction at work.
A vast improvement over Thursday when I lost my entire evening to a massive migraine.
Somewhere during the course of my work day someone mentioned that there was a baseball game on for the evening.
We aren't sports fans. You've seen how we do the Superbowl. But going to see the local AAA ball team play is something we usually do at least once every summer. We missed all the games last year in the chaos of our lives, and this year we just weren't paying attention at all. Many of the games come with an awesome fireworks display, so when I hear that there were fireworks as well as a game, I put going on my to-do list.
I got home from work, made a breakfast-for-dinner plate for my mom, and ate pie with Babygirl and Hubby. We arrived for the game a little over half an hour early, and were among the last five cars able to park in the stadium lot. When we got to the ticket line, there was a man holding up three tickets. His church had bought them in advance at the group rate and some of their people cancelled, so we got them for $20 TOTAL! (Our local park has some good deals, and I know we can get cheaper tickets with certain employer benefits and so on, but for last-minute for a playoff game I was pretty pleased.) They were the best seats I've ever had in the stadium. We were directly in front of the skyboxes looking straight up the first base line from above home plate, on the aisle - an important feature when your Hubby is a big man with a bum knee. And we were under shelter for a change, making the frosty air that rolled in when the sun went down more bearable for the always-freezing Babygirl.
Seeing as how we'd already had dessert, we had a traditional ball park dinner of hotdogs, and French fries, snacking on Cracker Jack later. And we watched the game with our new not-our-church friends. The people seated behind us were a family of two parents with about four girls. Between plays we heard any number of hysterical movie quotes, the most notable of which was, "Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die!"
And the game! Our team had won every game going into the playoffs, and had lost the first two of (potentially) five playoff games. So it was do-or-die for the team, much more serious than the usual mid-summer games. As far as I know, our team has never even made the playoffs before, and in all the times we've gone to games over the years, we've never seen them win even once. (Perhaps it would have gone better for the team if we'd somehow left THAT Karma home.)
No score in the first inning. Or the second. Third. Fourth.
Fifth inning came, and the other team got in two runs on a couple of horrible umpire calls. And it just kept going. If there was a bad way to call it, they called it that way for us. Somewhere during the fifth (or maybe sixth), one of the umps called our guy safe on second, then changed his mind and called him out, and then added the guy on first to the 'out' list and made the guy on third return to second......
And that's when the fight broke out. Teammates were holding back players who were trying to kill the ump. The other team was holding back the folks who were trying to kill our guys. The dugouts emptied out onto the field, and the crowd participated in a boo-fest the likes of which I've never heard. In the end, the crappy call held, and the umps ejected our team's manager from the game.
Even though our team ultimately lost, it was without a doubt the most exciting ball game I've ever seen. Fisticuffs in baseball? I posted on Facebook: "I went to watch baseball and a hockey game broke out."
The fireworks after the game were amazing but relatively anticlimactic after the fireworks DURING the game.
We had a lot of energetic, happy chatter in the car on the way home. We decided that we really MUST get to more games next summer, and we decided to at least try one actual hockey game this winter. If you live in a city, you should take advantage of the things that are available to do!
For a last-minute adventure, it rocked.
DeeDee
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