Every year the Chicago Public League hosts the city championship baseball game at one of Chicago’s Major League Baseball parks, alternating years between Guaranteed Rate Field (home of the Chicago White Sox) and Wrigley Field (home of the Chicago Cubs.) Meaning every year, two Chicago Public Schools teams — and their families, and their friends, and their classmates — get a free night of watching dreams come true. This year the game was at Wrigley.
This year the game also happened to be a matchup between my son’s high school (Kenwood Academy) and my daughter’s high school (Lane Tech College Prep). I took the Red Line after work to cheer on both teams (no bad outcome!), but mostly, honestly, to watch dreams come true. If you have known and loved a child who poured their whole heart and soul into something — sports, plays, band, art — you can’t watch a bunch of baseball-loving kids running on and off the ivy-ringed gem that is Wrigley Field, in their uniforms, surrounded by their teammates, cheered on by their peers and their parents, under the lights, and not get a little choked up.
I couldn’t anyway. You can’t see their names in lights, watch their game-changing hits replayed on the big screen, see them bound out of the on-deck circle to walk-up music that fills the park, knowing that every moment and hit and miss and catch and throw weighs a little more than usual, and not get a little choked up. I couldn’t anyway.
Fine, I cried the whole time. Mostly b.
