It's 6:30 in the morning.  I jump out of bed, throw on some clothes, and franctically prepare for the day ahead of me.  By 6:49 I'm parked in front of the screen, hot blood pumping through my ears, stomach made queasy by a sudden wash of adrenaline.  The advertisements seem eternal.  But then, finally, the results.

And oh, the joy.  The ecstasy.  Twins win!  Twins win!  Twins win!

Yes, I know it's embarrassing -- to get that excited over a silly baseball game.  But I think it's less about this season's (and specifically yesterday evening's) triumph,  dramatically winning the American League Central Division's championship over the Detroit Tigers, and more about remembering my childhood.

Because as much as the first paragraph above describes my actions from this morning -- going on-line to find out what had happened on the other side of the Atlantic while I slept last night -- it was actually written as a recollection from October of 1991.  I was 14 years old.  Having moved to Ohio from western Wisconsin when I was 10 years old, I somehow pinned a part of my identity to the Minnesota sports teams (even while everyone else around me cheered for Cleveland teams); and my bedroom walls were covered with posters of Anthony Carter and (especially) Kirby Puckett.  And 1991 was a good year to be a Minnesota Twins fan.  The previous year, they had been the worst team in baseball, but that year they had become the best team.  They were playing against the Atlanta Braves in the World Series, and I hung on every newspaper box score and television recap (which, given the local television networks' Ohio constituencies, only allowed the most cursory coverage of Twins highlights).  CNN Headline News was the only channel which could be reliably expected to report on the Twins' successes.  So I depended on their half-hourly sports updates (delivered at 20 minutes after the hour and 50 minutes after the hour).  And that year, every loss meant depression and despondancy.  And every win represented joy, ecstasy, and (oddly enough) a sense of self-affirmation.  I would be able to hold my head high in school that day.

The World Series that year went a whole seven games.  Tied at 3 games to 3, whoever won the seventh game of the World Series would be the world champion.  But wouldn't you know it:  the game happened to fall upon a school night.  So I had to go to bed without knowing the results of the game!  I don't know if I ever jumped out of bed as quickly as that following morning, anxiously awaiting the tidings that CNN Headline News would bring me at 6:50 AM.

When I learned that the Twins had won in extra innings, in one of the greatest World Series finshes of all time, I was... euphoric -- though even that word doesn't seem to come close to describing my joy.  It was probably one of the happiest moments of my life.  I know it sounds ridiculous to say that, but it really made that big of an impression on me.  I still remember the sights and sounds of that morning vividly.  I remember strutting around school with my Twins shirt on, soaking up the glory of that October morning.

I've grown up a lot since then.  Sports have become a significantly smaller part of my life (which is probably just as well).  And even when I do check in on sports scores these days, I'm actually much more balanced in my enthusiasm -- even investing a bit of emotinoal energy in the Ohio teams that I once loathed.  But when the Twins win another division title in dramatic fashion (some of the write-ups in the on-line news sources this morning talked about it as if it was one of the greatest baseball games of all time), pulling out a win in extra innings, jumping around on the artificial kermit-green turf of the Metrodome, you'll have to forgive me if my heart strings ended up getting tugged a little bit.  I don't hold out a whole lot of hope that they'll make it much further in the post-season this year (even making it out of the first round of the playoffs would be pretty impressive)... but you can bet I'll be checking the scores each morning.