Last week I truly enjoyed the fruits of a press pass.

Bestowed with week-long access to most of RFK, my colleagues and I shot a 30-minute magazine show to air in the DC and Chicago metro regions. The theme--nine innings, nine stories: what goes on beyond the dugout. Great stuff. Putting it together was worth every 100-degree, 100-percent humid, sweat-soaked moment at the stadium.

After the shooting was done, there was naught left to do but enjoy the game--one of the few free moments I could squeeze out of an otherwise professionally clouded summer. I caught a whiff of that wonderful summertime nostalgia sitting in the press box, replete with summer wind and the grating melody of cicadas. Combined with the crack of bats hitting balls and the snap of balls hitting gloves, the cheers and shouts of emphatic fans and the first grand slam home run I ever saw with my own eyes, it was a damn good night.

I soaked (literally) in the atmosphere while enjoying free food and drink and watching the game from an impressive vantage point along the first base line. The roomie and I dissected the plays, laughed at the mascot and cheered for the Nats. We started out sitting in the middle of the press box with no one else around us. Slowly, people began to fill in. By the third inning, we were surrounded on all sides. I happened to glance to my left at one point to see a gentleman gazing intently at the action on the field. Damn, he looks familiar, I thought. Hey wait, that's Tony Williams, the mayor of DC. Sweet. But shortly thereafter, I realized that the roomie and I were smack in the middle of the mayor's private party. And I saw him steal a few glances at us with the unmistakable "who the heck are those girls" look on his face. But no one said anything, so we continued happily freeloading.

During the sixth inning, we felt we had taken as much advantage of the situation as possible and decided to descend to the general admission seats to join some Medillians already there. It was a true sweatfest, but when Wilkerson hit the grand slam, I got caught up in the euphoria and forgot I was drenched.

I spent the whole week asking people why they love baseball. When I finally got to thinking about why it is I love it, I realized that I love it because of nights like that one--where I get to go to the ball park, breathe in the whole experience and be filled with memories of late summer afternoons when my father taught me how to throw a baseball, or summer nights on the sandlot in Avon Crest Park and at the batting cages of Ted's Fish Fry...memories of getting riled up at my brother's little league games and of hitting home runs with tennis balls so far back into the woods behind my house that we just left them there (and found dozens of them collected years later).

True that baseball is a thinking man's game, and that it is rife with history that parallels America's own history. Many fans I talked to in my research praised these truths. They add to my love of the game, but it really is the way it has been tied into my own life that makes it special to me. It's a romantic relationship really that has nothing to do with the actual mechanics of the game.

I can sum my feelings about baseball up with a reference to the penultimate scene of the Natural, when Roy Hobbs blasts one straight into the stadium lights which ignites a spray of spectacular fireworks as he makes his way around the diamond in slow motion. That's my baseball.