HOME COMING:

Every fan has his own list of unique baseball moments, but I can guarantee they are exactly like mine in how sharply they are etched into the mind. We possess them in a way we possess no other memories. They can't be touched by that deadly "fuzzy trace." They need no mental remaking. Baseball memories are different, because this impossible game touches on something fundamentally human: our innate longing for the eternal.

In the prologue to his epic novel Underworld, Don DeLillo describes, through the eyes of a fictional announcer, the aftermath of Bobby Thomson's pennant-winning, walk-off home run for the New York Giants at the Polo Grounds in 1951:

Russ thinks this is another kind of history. He thinks [the fans] will carry something out of here that joins them all in a rare way, that binds them to a memory with protective power. People are climbing lampposts on Amsterdam Avenue, tooting car horns in Little Italy. Isn't it possible that this midcentury moment enters the skin more lastingly than the vast shaping strategies of eminent leaders, generals steely in their sunglasses -- the mapped visions that piece our dreams? Russ wants to believe a thing like this keeps us safe in some undetermined way. This is the thing that will pulse in his brain come old age and double vision and dizzy spells -- the surge of sensation, the leap of people already standing, that bolt of noise and joy when the ball went in. This is the people's history and it has flesh and breath that quicken to the force of this old game of ours. And fans at the Polo Grounds today will be able to tell their grandchildren . . . that they were here when it happened.

The staying power of memories and moments like this one is largely due to nostalgia, of course -- but not in our watered-down conception of it. "Nostalgia" combines the Greek words nostos and algos to mean "a pain at returning home." And what is baseball about, if not returning home?

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