New logo. New shirts. New website. Pretty much the same old team.

Cue the music: that ubiquitous Green Day song about having the time of your life. It’s something unpredictable, but in the end it’s right… Can you hear it? Good.

Now let that run in a loop in your head as we roll the slo-mo footage. The lighting is rich and golden, with rays of sunlight glinting off the chain-link backstops of a dozen municipal ballfields. We see a lean man in a red MPR T-shirt in the midst of a crowd. They’re hanging on his every word. “Group A!” he barks. “Rothman, Keith, Catlin, Gorenflo….”

Fade to a montage that encapsulates the long, hard, painstaking labor that went into the invention of power lounging and the softball wake…. Fade to the day at Jimmy Lee Field when all the forces of the universe were perfectly aligned-when his gun of an arm unleashed a white-hot bullet that rocketed past the backstop, zipped through the open window of a parked car, and negotiated the space (there couldn’t have been more than a millimeter on either side) between the steering wheel and the belly of a pregnant woman….

Fade to the dark day at Nokomis when, while playing first base, a collision left him with a badly wounded wing-which he only discovered later, at the bar, when lifting a beer proved excruciating…. Fade to more bars-the All-American, the Cromwell, DeGidio’s, J.R. Mac’s-and the familiar litany, win or lose: “Does everyone have a beverage of choice? Helluva game!” or, more often, “Helluvan effort!”….

And finally, fade to that last evening on the active roster, when with his glove and his bat he ensured that the game ended the only way it could, after all these years: in a tie. No winners. No losers. Just people playing ball. Get yourself a beverage of choice and join the Historian in a toast: “Helluvan everything, Mr. Eichten! This team wouldn’t exist without you, and we hope you had the time of your life.”