"This moment probably occurs at some point in your 20s, probably around the time you notice that, oh wow, most of the players in the game are younger than you are. That weird mind-flip. It's not that you stop loving, hating, or marveling over players. It's that by the time you're, say, 27, the open-horizon feeling of childhood has started to dwindle. You're beginning to lose that glimmery deep-down belief that everything is possible. You're playing sports less seriously than you used to, if you ever played sports seriously. You knew when you were 16 that you were never going to be Michael Jordan — of course you did — but a future in which you had become Michael Jordan was still available to your imagination; it was impossible but not irrelevant. Now it's both. You hit 30, 35, 40, and the life of a professional athlete seems more and more remote. It's one of a million pasts that never happened rather than a future you can dream about."
"God, let me watch sports like a 9-year-old forever."
"I would understand later that baseball was what truly made him an American: the sports pages were more crucial documents than the Constitution."
- Pete Hamill, A Drinking Life
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