There is a minor league baseball team in San Antonio called the San Antonio Missions. They were there when I was kid (their Wikipedia page says they’ve existed, in one form or another, since 1888, which can’t possibly be right), and so my grandma would take my sisters and me to their games every so often. Best I can tell, there were two reasons she did so: (1) She liked baseball. She was a very big Detroit Tigers fan. In fact, in my closet right now is an autographed Al Kaline jersey that she left to me when she passed away nine years ago. She knew I didn’t like baseball but she left it to me anyway because she was funny like that. I miss her a lot. (2) The tickets were cheap (it feels like I remember there being nights when it was 100 percent free to get in, which also can’t possibly be right), meaning it was one of the things we could afford to do without much worry.

As such, the actual games were always a secondary part of any of the memories we made there. And that’s been how my entire relationship with any form of baseball has worked: as part of the periphery. Some of my cousins played a lot of little league ball, for example, and we would definitely go watch them play a lot, but mostly I’d just wander around with my friends and try to figure out a way to hustle up $2 to get a chili-cheese Frito pie and a Gatorade. In high school, I managed to avoid the game entirely, save for a single trip to watch the Missions play my freshman year that I only remember because a friend of mine almost made out with a girl there. In college, I signed up to play on a co-ed softball team that some people I knew put together, but I never actually managed to make it to an actual game. And to this day, I’ve taken my sons to exactly one Astros game. That was over seven years ago, and all we did was go there, find our seats, eat some ice cream out of a tiny helmet (which was adorable), and then leave. (I’m pretty sure we didn’t make it past the third inning.)

But the Astros are in the World Series now, and I live in Houston, and everyone I know here is talking about it and thinking about it and considering the possibility that, for the first time in their franchise history the Astros could win a title, and also for the first time in over two decades a Houston team could win a championship in one of the Big Three sports. So starting last Wednesday, which was when they had that bonkers Game 2, I have been watching the games to watch the games. I watched Game 3 from the fourth inning on, then watched Game 4 from the third inning until the Dodgers scored 100 runs in the top of the ninth, then watched Game 5—if you can even believe this—from the beginning until the end. It was my first ever Baseball Weekend. Some notes: