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There’s a W.P. Kinsella short story I remember reading in my teens about a fat kid who’s recruited out of the stands to play with Leo Durocher’s 1951 New York Giants. The shy aspiring writer joins the team for the stretch drive of the Giant’s famous comeback season, earning a nickname in the process. There was more to the story, of course, but a trip to Cooperstown, N.Y. and the National Baseball Hall of Fame over the Thanksgiving weekend had me thinking about it again.

I’ve wanted to get to Cooperstown for years. For a baseball lover, the chocolate-box town is the heart of the game’s history and tradition. It’s the place where every pro aspires to one day be named, the place where ghosts of the legends still linger. And it’s the place every fan approaching his 43rd birthday and who’s not yet made the Haj begins to wonder if he can still call himself a fan.

So my wife, two daughters (9 and 8) and Grandma, who’d flown in the day before, skipped town Friday morning and drove the autumn-accented highways of upstate New York through towns called Boonville, Lowville and Utica. Twenty years ago, I’d travelled the same highways playing on a travelling team based in Kanata. Many of the town names were familiar.

We spent Saturday at the Hall, revelling in the rich history and sentimentality, paying special attention to anything related the extinct Montreal Expos, my childhood team. I found one Canadian (Ferguson Jenkins), two Expos (Gary Carter and Andre Dawson) and two Toronto Blue Jays (Roberto Alomar and Pat Gillick). I took it all in slowly, snapped pictures of important plaques and displays and nodded reverentially to other middle-aged men wearing the same awed expression on their faces.

I walked Main Street and explored the baseball tourist traps and found an Expos cap buried amongst the overbearing mountains of Yankees and Red Sox paraphernalia. Then I headed to Doubleday Field, a 9,700-seat stadium in the Hall’s backyard named after the reputed inventor of baseball, Abner Doubleday. The 90-year-old stadium played host to an annual Major League exhibition game until a few years ago and now features a retired-players game every summer. With its red brick façade and green grandstand, it’s a jewel of a park, a perfect slice of Minor League Americana. But it’s not treated like a museum set, it’s accessible and teams from all over travel to Cooperstown to play in an endless list of amateur tournaments.

And there was a game going on. I sat in the stands on an uncommonly warm October day and watched some kind of senior men’s tournament and thought about the Kinsella story. The inning ended without anyone asking me to play and I headed off to find the family.

Later on in the motel, watching the baseball playoffs, my youngest burst through the door with Grandma trailing closely and called me to the motel’s pool because there were “some guys on a team who want you to play with them tomorrow.”

A men’s team from Philadelphia, the players in their 40s and 50s, told me they were on their annual Columbus Day trip to compete in a round-robin tournament and yes, the invite is real and they need pitching. They were happy to hear they’d extended an invitation to someone who still plays in a league every weekend. They were also tickled to learn the next day’s game would fall on my birthday.

I dressed in borrowed Dodger blue the morning I turned 43 and pitched a 9-inning complete game win (the score was 14-8) on Doubleday Field in Cooperstown against a team from Boston. Fred, Jack, the team manager, and Carl, who had his son with him and Mike and Bob, retired U.S. Air Force veterans (and too many other names to remember) were as giddy I was about the serendipitous collision of right place and right time. They told everyone they encountered, including the umps and the fans in the stands, the story of the Canadian they met in the motel pool who was now pitching for them. Their genuine enthusiasm was uplifting. I felt as though old friends had conspired to spring a surprise for me.

But it was more than just getting into a game. When you’ve played your whole life and join others who’ve played their whole lives, there’s nothing lost in translation. You hear the same encouraging chatter from the infield, you know intuitively what to do in any situation and quickly realize they do too, all of which is oddly comforting. It’s like meeting a group of expats in a foreign country and realizing you’ve a bond with these strangers simply because of who you are. It wouldn’t feel the same in any other circumstance.

It wasn’t until I got home and had a great phone call with my mom and dad that I really put my finger on how special a moment it was. I realized that the guys on the Dodgers all in some way reminded me of fathers of my high school teammates (many of whom were American), when dads would coach and practice with the team, throwing batting practice and teaching you how to play the game.

I went to Cooperstown thinking I’d be a passive observer of baseball history, but left realizing that I got to relive, for a moment, a little of my own baseball history. And really, that’s the real power of the game. It has this knack of being able to connect you with things you’ve cared about your whole life and resurface associated emotions even when you’re old and grey. Those memories aren’t about a town or a Hall of Fame, they’re about the people you’ve share the game with.