Point of View: Spring in the Step

There is a spring in my step this spring for it seems as if sports-wise all will be well, to wit, that while the teams I cover may not win out, they promise to be beguiling, which is all one can hope for if one is a local sportswriter — that and balmy weather.

Baseball, which won only three games last year and none the year before, has already “won” three scrimmages — I count them as W’s — and boys tennis bageled its archrival, Westhampton Beach, last week, the same day the softball team that Annemarie Cangliosi Brown, Melanie Anderson, and Mylan Eckhart are reviving outdid their Sag Harbor neighbors in a scrimmage.

“We’re very happy, very pleased, I only have a couple of notes, which we’ll go over tomorrow in practice,” said Anderson, as I wished her a happy birthday. 

“Any walking steals?” I asked, knowing that that chaos-creating tactic would remind Cangliosi Brown and Anderson of their exacting yet avuncular mentor, Lou Reale, now retired to The Villages near Orlando. Not that day, but soon, the coaches said, smiling.

Everyone’s smiling these days. They certainly are in the baseball dugout, owing certainly in part to the team’s three batboys, Hudson Meyer and Kai and Finn Alversa, the coaches’ young sons. It’s great to see. 

And while it’s plain to see also that there is both good and evil in the world — an inordinate amount of the latter it would seem at the moment — I prefer fixing my gaze on the good, on the amiable, and on the camaraderie that buoys teams and lifts spirits in general. In fact, if all of us concentrated our minds that way we might go far toward lessening the amount of evil that’s dragging us down.

And, with that, I’m off to the fields again, to see the girls lacrosse and baseball teams play. The sun is shining, and the weather is bearable, as is the lightness of my being.