I was worried about getting this post up before it lost its relevance. But after I thought about it a while, I realized that, just like the man the song is about, it never will. This especially goes for fans of the Seattle Mariners like me who came of age with hip-hop and baseball at the same time Macklemore did.

While Mack’s vivid memory is of listening to games late at night in the garage with his father, mine is of sitting in the backseat of my parents’ Ford LTD station wagon, a big yellow whale of a car with the old school fold-down seats in the very back. It was an unusually hot Sunday afternoon in the San Juan Islands and my father had just bought my brother and I some 1989 Donruss wax packs from the local market (yes, I grew up in a rural part of Washington State where we didn’t have a grocery store, we had a “market”). The packs were the kind where the sealant invariably left a greasy residual stain on the unlucky last card in the package, and the extra prize inside was a team sticker that I habitually peeled and affixed to my school books.

I was twelve years old and my brother was nine and that was the day I first learned who Ken Griffey, Jr. was when, after pulling the card pictured above from one of the packs, my dad instructed me to, “Hold onto that one right there, he’s going to be a great player.” Dave Niehaus’ voice was coming through on the car’s AM radio. Most likely he was trying to find the brighter side of yet another Mariners loss, and I probably wasn’t thinking as much about the game as the cards in my hands, my pre-adolescent, corduroy-shorted legs sweaty and stuck to the car’s cheap viny upholstery. In retrospect, it was a perfect day and one of very few that I remember so vividly.

Two days ago, as I sat on a New York City subway commuting to work, over two thousand five hundred miles away from my hometown, nestled deep into the cold Northeast winter, I listened to “My Oh My,” Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’ tribute to the late voice of the Mariners, on my iPod. And, though light years away from that hot sunny day on Lopez Island, I returned there again in my mind. And I nearly choked up, right there in the subway car. In the hardest city in America.

And therein lies the great value of sports. Of what are otherwise just collections of trivial games and waxy pieces of cardboard. I’ve come to realize that, even though I love baseball, it’s not the actual innings or the people who play them that ultimately matter. It’s the unbreakable bonds they form to a simpler time and a youth that can’t be relived. Bonds of fathers to sons (and daughters). And of grown-up children to their homes.

Click “Play” to listen to “My Oh My” by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis. Click here for the D/L link.