BALTIMORE – Sprayed in orange and perhaps as much curiosity as pride, a gleaming new Cal Ripken Jr. statue in its left-center field, a real September game on its grounds, Camden Yards hadn't looked this good this late in going on a generation.

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Among my last memories of being here, from the decade before last, hundreds of people in the left-field bleachers stood mid-game, let their hinged seats shudder closed beneath them and walked out en masse. Protesting the state of their home ballclub, the owner Peter Angelos, the growing financial clout of the visiting New York Yankees and whatever else might have been on their minds, they paid to come in quietly and leave prematurely. And clamorously.

That was about the last time I – or just about anyone not overtaken by Palmer, Boog, Brooks, Blair, Ripken and Murray, only to be beholden to their franchise forever – had given much thought to the Baltimore Orioles.

Now there are fall perennials blooming along the perimeter of the ballpark. They're orange. The streets and alleys on Thursday evening were alive with orangey people, the ballpark would be full with Orioles fans and not Yankees interlopers, and the home team was relevant for the first time since it was run by Davey Johnson, eight managers and 15 years past.

The teams here, the hopelessness, they'd conspired to run the old girl down some. It's not that she didn't look great. She did. But, then, maybe she'd lost some of her soul in the trudge of second-division finishes and apathy, and so she'd become a symbol of what was. Maybe that's OK for a statue. It does very little for a ballpark.

Fourteen consecutive losing seasons has that effect on a building, on a city, on a baseball fan.

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They're back, the people, the town and the spirit of a place that had reason to wander. Maybe just for a weekend, maybe for a whole season, maybe all the way into October, they're back. Probably.

They cling to the legend of Buck Showalter, the way he revives teams, the way he stalks to and from the mound with his head down and his right hand stuffed in his pocket, all business and asymmetry, and the way he's convinced this will work. They measure this funny little band of players, who pluck and grind and have convinced themselves to believe, and a payroll that probably won't be going anywhere too good too soon. They grant that maybe the back-from-the-dead general manager might indeed have a touch for this sort of thing, or that Andy MacPhail may have been onto something, but perhaps shouldn't over-think any of it.

For on this steamy Thursday night, the Orioles had those Yankees in for the first of four games at Camden Yards, and it was the place to be. By the time John Denver roared over the loudspeakers, the Orioles had all but retaken a tie for first in the AL East. The people cheered and danced and shouted, "Thank God I'm a country boy!" as though they'd been here all along and never left.

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