Your nostalgia hit for today

I am in this photo, somewhere. Behind the glass in the pressbox, way back there in the background. One of those dots in the grandstands, more likely. But I am there, on the chill damp evening of April 19, 1993, with Wayne the Wizard and those fresh-faced kids in their clean white unis, and Dan Fox the trainer standing next to Wayne there.

Twenty-seven years ago tomorrow. Holy guacamole.

I was 38 years old then and baseball had returned to the Fort, taking up a weave that stretched back to the 1870s. The Kekiongas played here, in the game's infancy. Babe Ruth hit a barnstorming home run here.  The Daisies made history here and the Fort Wayne Colored Giants played here, and Chuck Klein and Bill Wambsganss and Steve Hargan and Eric Wedge and a whole pile of others either came from here or played baseball here before moving on to the bigs.

So, yeah. This was fertile ground. And so Memorial Stadium went up and the Wizards came and I remember that night, remember everyone sitting in slack-jawed wonder at the ballpark and the players and whole idea of professional baseball in Fort Wayne.

It's a pleasant thing to contemplate, on this counterfeit morning with the April sun shining on snowy rooftops in this strange and counterfeit time in Bastard Plague America.

I remember spending part of that night sitting next to a delightful man named John "Red" Braden, 80-something and a part of our splendid baseball weave for decades. He's looking out at the lights and the diamond and the ballplayers, and he's seeing 1928. He's seeing himself as a teenager, going door-to-door with a petition to bring a Cardinals minor-league team to Fort Wayne.

It didn't happen then. It wouldn't happen for another six-and-a-half decades. Now Red Braden was in the twilight of his life, present and account for at the dawn of his ancient dream.

"All of a sudden I'm seein' what I was ..." he said.

And couldn't really finish. Just kept staring out at the lights and the players and the green April grass.

I remember that. I remember walking around the ballpark on this dreary evening when nothing  matched its gray flannel sky. People were lining up at the concession stands. Kids were scurrying everywhere, everywhere. A young man named Ramon Valette christened the new ballpark with its first home run, a shot into the netting above the left-field fence. Another young man named Scott Moten rang up the first strikeout.

The Wizards beat Peoria, 7-2. And went on to finish 68-67, drawing north of 300,000 fans for the inaugural season.

And now it is 27 years later, and the Wizards are now the TinCaps. And Memorial Stadium is a parking lot. Ramon Valette hasn't played baseball in 22 years; Scott Moten last pitched for Orlando in Double-A ball in 1997.

And Red Braden?

Waiting somewhere, no doubt, for the lights to come up again. And for the ballplayers to take the field. And for all of it to start up again.

Same as the rest of us, in other words. Same as the rest of us.