I had no idea that it would be so hard. 

Let's get this out of the way right from the top: Yankee Stadium is, by almost any measure, a pretty crappy stadium.  One might even go so far as to call it a shithole.

A few weeks ago I went to my first game at Minute Maid Park, nee Enron Field, here in Houston.  It is a beautiful facility.  Every seat has a great view of the field, the concourses are spacious, and the place feels new and clean and bright.  Walking through Yankee Stadium, on the other hand, feels kind of like hanging out in the basement of a factory.  The concourses are dimly lit.  Everything is dark painted concrete.  It looks worn down, tired, and old. 

So why did I spend nearly four hours last night fighting back (very manly) tears watching the last game that will ever be played on that field?

When the Yankees move next door, it will be the near-completion of a transition the Yankees started after 2001, aka The Greatest World Series Ever Played (TM).  I took for granted how good I had it as a baseball fan at the end of the 90s.  When that team started to break up, I just assumed that the new generation of players would slide in and keep the good times rolling.  But the new collection of traveling All-Stars never approached the level of chemistry and performance that the team assembled at the end of the 90s had.  Jason "The Stache" Giambi and Alex "Frosted Tips and Lip Gloss" Rodriguez outperform Tino Martinez and Scott Brosius on the stat sheets, but it hasn't translated into rings. 

It isn't the post-season failures that bother me, though.  Well, they bother me a little, but only once have I felt worse after a post-season loss than I did last night, a regular season victory over the Orioles. What hurts is the realization that I failed to properly appreciate success when it happened.  I watched exactly 3 minutes of the 1999 World Series.  I saw the final out, and shrugged as the Yankees mobbed each other.  The Yanks winning the World Series was the natural order of things, like Star Wars movies being great or Democrats in the White House.  Why were we getting all excited about it?

But now I know the truth: the Yankees will probably win another World Series in my lifetime, but I will never see another team like the one from 10 years ago.  And one by one, the connections I have to the glory years are being broken.  The Yankees started their run in 1996 as underdogs.  Then they became the favorites, and then a dynasty.  Now they are hardly even a baseball team anymore.  They are a business, moving into their new corporate headquarters across the street.

When the Stadium closed last night, I was able to hold back my (very manly) tears.  God help me when Mariano Rivera retires.  I will weep openly.