It was cool in 2004, wandering the streets of Boston, thinking about my plan to move to California in early 2005 and watching the Sox take the series. My grandfather’s team. The team where every summer it seemed we got a chance to run up and down the bleachers at Fenway.

Better yet in 2004, I got a chance to run up and down the bleachers at Fenway in the middle of the night as a paid extra for “Fever Pitch,” just hours after the real, non-faked games finished up, when the local papers had already printed their block headlines of sports hope. I actually got to go inside the men’s room in the middle of the night and see the trough-like urinal I had heard about from my brothers.

Maybe because of my grandfather, maybe because of Little League games, maybe because it was the one sport where Pat new the rules and could read a box score or maybe because it’s the one sport where slow pans on TV and the long gaps, the conversations on the mounds, the hand signals, the dugout all provide enough time for you to feel like you know the players. Maybe it’s all of it, but every summer baseball is there in the back of my head and in fall I start paying better attention.

Of course, this year we saw this same team play in Oakland (and lose with flair in many extra innings) back in June.

So, there it is. Back of the mind subconscious part of my make up. And, I’m having fun. I like watching the games. I like assuring a sleepy friend in Boston that Game 2 could go on without her worrying and losing sleep. I liked wearing my socks of a red color to work.

Today, I realized that baseball trivia lived deep within me.

Two folks at the place of giving me a paycheck were talking Sox in the lunchroom standing next to the food. It was a serious fan conversation out of my league (no pun), but it was definitely not about baseball in general it was about the Boston Red Sox. I interjected with a little “Go Sox” admission of eavesdropping and asked if there was a Boston connection.

Turns out, I work every day in the same building, breathing the same energy-efficient, naturally lighted air, as Hall-of-Famer Jim Lonborg’s sister. Without even thinking, I spoke, and I told them of my little, little, little kid love of Tony Conigliaro (or maybe just saying his name). Somewhere in the lizard recesses of my gray-matter creases, I was channeling the ’67 Sox and spontaneously coming up with references in conversation. I would have been three year’s old. What the fuck?

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