Tonight I got to watch with my daughter as my favorite team played baseball outside. It does not matter that they lost 2-0. It doesn't matter that it rained. It doesn't matter that my ankle was killing me by the time I was walking back to the car. Tilly charmed the people around us in Section 240, Row 5, Seat 7. She charmed people she saw in the wonderfully wide concourses as she sat on my shoulders, grinning. She hung on tight to me when the guys in the bleachers down the right field line were clamoring for Jim Thome to do anything but strike out with the bases loaded in the bottom of the 8th.
There is so much to love about this new ballpark. There are thousands of nooks, perches and spots to watch the game. I love the Metrodome for what it was and what it did...for the place it held in my life and in my process of growing up. But it was so utterly bad for the literal experience of watching a baseball game, in hind sight.
Tonight, I felt like an albino mole coming out of a hole, poking my head into the sunny back yard of the baseball gods. I felt like I was shaking off 29 years of darkness...letting my pupils adjust to the way things should have been all along.
This new field and the experience there...it's kind of like they took the State Fair, wrapped it up in a tea bag, and steeped it in baseball juices. That's going to take quite a while for any novelty to wear off of that experience. This is going to be fun.
PS: Tilly got a pair of Twins slippers.
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