Experienced a lot of endings lately.

Each team in high school or college—and now in general in the pros—has a life expectancy of one year. That team will always be a team; just because you run out of games doesn’t mean you are no longer a team. You are forever bound, can have reunions, vacation together, but…

But there are no more games to play.

I’m on a Group Me thread with Louisiana Tech’s baseball team; the Bulldogs’ season ended this week in the Conference USA Tournament. After the final game, the list game out late last week for individual post-season meetings, and then this.

“Tanner Huddleston has left the group,” popped up on my phone.

Dang.

And then,

“Logan Robbins has left the group…”

“Mason Robinson has left the group…”

And on like that.

Seniors. 12 of them on that team. And one by one…

Seeya.

The finality of ball, a long road that ends so suddenly, on a groundout or a pop up, is what gets you. It’s not over and then…it’s over.

No more games to play.

Long before he was Commissioner of Major League Baseball, the late A. Bartlett Giamatti was a 40-year-old lifelong Red Sox fan who suffered through the final game of the 1977 regular season, a loss to Baltimore. A win would have extended Boston’s season.

With nothing much to do one afternoon and the season over, he wrote an essay he titled Green Fields of the Mind. It eventually ran in the Yale Alumni Magazine—mainly because he’d recently been named the University’s president.

It’s become popular through the years. Each year when Boston’s season ends, the team’s radio broadcasters read a piece of it on-air. Look it up sometime. It might help, if your season is over.

“It breaks your heart,” Giamatti wrote. “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.”

-30-