Is one ever too old to learn a new sport, to exalt in the art of athletic movement, to play with the ecstatic joy and abandon of a child? Well, actually, yes. That revelation came to me recently when I tried to pick up lacrosse. It happened the day after my lesson. Or maybe it was that evening. If I was being honest with myself, it happened as I became winded while jogging up and down the field with Greg Gurenlian, a star midfielder with the New York Lizards who is affectionately known as "the Beast."

What possessed me to attempt lacrosse at my advanced age? For those unfamiliar with the sport—as I was while growing up in the city, until I got to college and saw preppies playing it—it's sort of like soccer. But instead of moving the ball up and down the field with your feet, you cradle it in a mesh basket atop a stick, lobbing it to teammates while maneuvering for an opportunity to score. (The professional lacrosse season runs from late April to early August, and the Lizards' home games are played at Icahn Stadium on Randalls Island and at Hofstra University's James M. Shuart Stadium.) Contact with your opponents is acceptable—hence the helmets, gloves and shoulder pads.

In the same way that there's pleasure in making contact with a tennis ball, in bending the laws of physics to your will, there's something about throwing and catching the small, rubber lacrosse ball. Maybe a better analogy than soccer is baseball—that ying and yang of launching the ball and the equal if not greater pleasure of having it land in the center of your mitt with a satisfying pop. Except there's no pop with the lacrosse stick.

Part of the intellectual rush of lacrosse—and feel free to take my words with however many grains of salt necessary because I've handled a lacrosse stick perhaps a half dozen times my whole life, and only for short intervals—comes from the sense of control one can experience when a piece of sports equipment becomes an extension of the body. That's the reason I signed up for a lesson with Mr. Gurenlian: to attempt that mind/body/lacrosse stick unity. And also as an excuse to play catch during office hours.

If you have as much interest in lacrosse as in quantum mechanics and have already considered stopping reading and moving on to the financial pages or the real-estate ads, and if you are a younger parent, here's something to consider: According to "the Beast" (actually, it might just be "Beast," a moniker earned not just because of his body mass index but also due to his ability to wrest, or rather wrestle, the ball from opponents—but more about that later), the sport may help get your kid into college.