Metrodome RIP

I've attended hundreds of shows, worked around jets and pretended to coo over caterwauling newborns, but it was still the loudest thing I'd ever heard. In the ninth inning, Ben looked at me, and mouthed in his best Northern Minnesota accent 'my ears ain't working so good.'

It was late August 2008, and the Twins were about to beat the hated White Sox to claim first place in their division. Anything seemed possible, and nothing else seemed nearly as important. Work, politics, relationships, peculiar rashes, whatever. The Twins were getting it done, and sixty-thousand people roared themselves hoarse. I've been to Wrigley, Comiskey, Kaufmann, County and Busch, each more aesthetically pleasing than the Hubert H. Humprhey Metrodome, but I had never experienced that same verve and excitement as I did then.

Yesterday, my father and I attended what will likely be for both of us the last game in the Metrodome. We spent seven of nine innings reminiscing all the past glories that had taken place in the carpeted sarcophagus; the '87 and '91 World Series, and the exciting playoff atmospheres of more recent years; the way the ball echoed off the bat, a sound my friends and I used to recreate during our own little-league games.

It's fashionable to bemoan the stadium's woeful inadequacies, the cramped concourses, urinary troughs, high school cafeteria-quality eats and the narcotic atmosphere of miles of unfilled blue plastic seats. It was never meant for baseball, but millions of us have embraced its flaws to call it home. The first stadium I ever visited, it still manages an odd majesty even in its final days.

I don't doubt I'll grow to love Target Field, but it will be a new kind of love; a seasoned, mature appreciation that comes from having gained and lost, from having my emotions manipulated 162 times a year, for most of my conscious life. For that, there will always be a small patch of faded, torn Astro-Turf in my heart.