Since its inception in 1980, the Make-A-Wish Foundation has been responsible for granting the wishes of thousands of children with life threatening illnesses all across the United States. While the vast majority of wishes involve taking vacations, meeting celebrities or going to Disneyland, occasionally kids go off-prompter, and things get awesome. For example ...

8 Sam Gets the Big-League Treatment

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Like so many other young boys who enjoy standing around doing nothing for hours at a time, 11-year-old Sam loved to play baseball. However, in recent years, neuroblastoma, a cancer that affects the nervous system, had tragically left him unable to take the field with his team. Despite his illness, Sam wanted a place to watch and cheer on his friends, leading to his wish for a baseball field to be built in his backyard.

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"Just the field. You can keep Kevin Costner."

And it worked. The community got together and totally Field of Dreams'ed the shit out of little Sam and built a baseball field. Such an enormous task required help and donations from numerous sources. First, grounds crews from the University of Mississippi and Itawamba Community College dedicated hundreds of hours to the project. Next, numerous local groups donated, among other things, sod, fencing, a backstop, an irrigation system and a scoreboard.

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It's actually nicer than where the Oakland A's play.

Sam chose 18 friends for him to manage, and on the day of the grand opening, a police-escorted limo drove him to the field where a crowd of hundreds cheered him on. Brought in to face Sam's team was a local junior varsity team -- all of whom must have just felt like dicks.