Some of the greatest times I had with my dad were at Shea Stadium, which is where the Jets also played back in the days when Joe Namath was their quarterback. On a cold, rainy Sunday, like the one forecast for this weekend, we’d drive out to Queens from New Jersey and shiver and cheer and laugh as Namath lit up the sky with passes that seemed to arc like a rainbow high over the heads of the defenders and then descend into the sure-fire hands of crackerjack receivers like Don Maynard and George Sauer Jr.

The prices were reasonable enough that my dad and I never gave a second thought to the cost. Even the scalpers’ tickers were affordable.

The changes over the years were imperceptible enough that no one gave them much notice. There’s no way to pinpoint when we became a country that could build the biggest, most garish, most electronically equipped stadiums you could imagine, but almost nothing else.

The auto industry is on its knees and we’ve got school buildings in sorry shape and we can’t even rebuild a public hospital in New Orleans. But the Dallas Cowboys have a brand new billion-dollar-plus domed stadium that looks like something out of “Star Wars.”

They actually sell tours of this stadium, and the ticket prices for the tours are more than families used to pay to go to professional sporting events.

Almost every adult I’ve ever spoken with who went to a baseball or football game as a child remembers the shock of entering the stadium and then suddenly coming upon the glorious expanse of emerald green grass, sparkling beneath the sun or the brilliant lights at night games.

I remember that those games seemed to go by with the speed of light. The seventh and eighth innings  or the fourth quarter in football  used to come so fast. You never wanted it to be over.

Maybe this is not the biggest issue facing the country, but I can’t help feeling we’re making a big mistake pricing these games out of the reach of today’s boys and girls who are growing up in families of modest means.