One summer afternoon in 1839, at Cooperstown, on the shore of Otsego Lake in upstate New York, the boys of the Otsego Academy were playing a game of town ball against Green's Select School.

Despite its troubles and the country's; despite AstroTurf and television; despite the ignominious departure of Pete Rose and the second coming of George Steinbrenner, the game can still summon up sublime moments of grace and skill and accomplishment that speak to us in our time precisely as they would have spoken to our fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers in their time, and as they will delight our sons and daughters in theirs.