Suzanne Maggio

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Standing in history

There are moments that make your knees weak. Moments that make your heart go flutter, sneaking up and you and catching you unexpectedly. There are moments that take your breathe away, that cannot be described in words.

There are moments, as I tell my students, that live in our memory filed in our mental filing cabinet under the category labeled "unforgetable".

For as long as I can remember, I have loved the game of baseball. It is a game of history, a game that brings us together, young and old, men and women. A girl and her grandpa sitting shoulder to shoulder in the blue seats of Shea, eating hot dogs and talking about a favorite player and a moment that could have been.

It is a game that reminds a daughter of a mother who no longer remembers, of a time when she told her stories of Carl Erskine and Jackie Robinson and the fall day, many years ago, when Bobby Thompson's shot broke her heart.

It is a game that allows total strangers to sit on a tree-lined street and talk pitching and catching and records that will never be broken.

It is a game of moments and of memories.

It was those moments that caught in my throat yesterday. Those memories that fell as tears as we sang "Take Me Out to the Ballgame." Those moments that caught me, unexpectedly, as I stood in the hall lined with plaques of men who have come before. The memories of a little girl who loved the Miracle Mets and a woman who now bleeds orange and black.

And it was a moment that can only be described as unforgetable.