In my mind, I still think I could play third base, could field the one-hopper, hop-step and throw the bullet to first base to get the runner by a step.  In my mind, it’s me and the pitcher, one-on-one and I feel rather than hear the bat strike the ball and I hear the wind whip past my ears as I sprint to first base. I smell the dust.  I hear the voices from my dugout. I know my skin, by the end of the game, will have a light coating of mud—dust mixed with the sweat of sweet effort.

In my mind.

It has been fifteen years since I put the supple black glove in the green bag at the end of a game —I played third in a co-ed game and threw out a runner trying to score on one of those one-hoppers, the ball going over his shoulder perfectly to the catcher who forced him out at home in a bases-loaded situation.  My spiked shoes are in the bag, too, although the soles have pulled away from the tops because dozens of nights of game-sweat eventually rotted the stitching.

I say it was my “most recent game,” not my “last game.”

I know the love of playing the game, a changing game as skills eroded, from that first season of baseball as an 8-year old batter terrified of a 10-year old pitcher (I summoned the courage to swing at a pitch in my last game and singled past the undoubtedly stunned pitcher), to fast-pitch softball, and finally (when fast-pitch disappeared and too many young men found it easier to impress the girlfriends by mashing looper league pitches over fences) slow pitch softball.

It was, and is, the game.  Playing the game in whatever form talent and circumstance allowed.

Many of us now slow of foot, thick of waist, driven by delusions of adequacy, understand when a young—by our standards—major league star finds the game is beyond his competitive capabilities. Or is told the game is now beyond their once-awsome abilities.

NO, we cry.  No!  We can still play!  I can still do this!

But at 60 or 70 or 80, it is easier to admit that no, we really can’t.  Or shouldn’t.  But we will remember.  And we will wish.

It is much worse when you are but 40.

We look at players such as Albert Pujols, old at 41, hanging on or wanting to hang on because the game has a grip on him more than he still has a grip on the game.

It comes to all athletes in all sports.  But for those at the highest levels, the realization can be agonizingly hard to accept.  I can get one more home run. I can strike out one more batter. I can throw one more touchdown.  I can hit one more buzzer-beater.

But others can do more while I’m striving for my one-more. I can be pushed aside.

Most of us common folks who hold regular jobs have the luxury of deciding there are too many other things to do in life than go to the workplace every day. Stepping away is easier, sometimes just plain joyous.

We never have to face the idea that we are 40 and there no longer is a place for us in the world that has been the consuming passion of our lives—all our lives.

The passion is there.  The fire of competition still rages within. But in a world that relies on physical skills, recognizing that ours no longer match our passion enough to stay in the competitive arena is so hard to accept.

As fans of sport, we do not measure our heroes by their age and when we think they are done when they are “only” 40, we realize these heroes are not ageless but are as human as we are—although we don’t have to realize we are old until we are old.

Moments such as these recall for us English Edwardian poet A. E. Housman’s elegy for a young athlete who died before he joined the great mass of those who faded into obscurity as their skills waned. He called it “To An Athlete Dying Young.”

The time you won your town the race, We chaired you through the market place;  Man and boy stood cheering by And home we brought you shoulder high.

The poem later speaks of “the road all runners come,” and “fields where glory does not stay, and early though the laurel grows, it withers quicker than the rose.”

Such is the life of our heroes of the playing field.

We who watch them might realize before they do that “glory does not stay.”  That time comes for all of us but usually not when we are just forty and have spent our lives among an elite few who can do what they have been doing. We sometimes say goodbye to them before they can bring themselves to say goodbye to the world that has consumed their lives.

It is much harder to step aside when you are 40 and a 25-year-old is doing what you only think you can still do, than it is when you are 65 and realize there is something liberating ahead.

Another English poet, from one generation earlier than Housman’s, wrote, “The last of life, for which the first was made…youth shows but half; Trust god: See all, nor be afraid.”

In time the resistance to Robert Browning’s sentiment will diminish.  But it is hard to accept when you are an athlete playing old.