Growing up, obsessed as I was with sports, Fenway Park was a place of wonder for me. I was also appreciative of any opportunity that brought escape from my three sisters & some quality father-son time. Visits happen less often these days, given I have no interest in baseball, but I gladly joined my old man last week for the chance to watch Derek Jeter play his final game.

We traded the pre-game celebration of Jeter’s career for a couple good cheeseburgers a few blocks from the park, but got to our seats with plenty of time to watch him smack a chopper down the third base line for an RBI. The crowd cheered wildly. Three guys behind us had made the four-hour drive from Brooklyn that morning, & from the volume of the pro-Yankee chants all around us, they weren’t the only ones.

When Jeter was pulled from the game shortly after his hit, the crowd came to their feet in applause, & then, mostly, left. Outside the park, people offered five dollars for our used ticket stubs.

By most accounts, Jeter was a great baseball player — accomplished both individually & as a member of a successful team. I won’t pretend to know if the accolades are warranted, but I will acknowledge whatever magic he represents that motivated thousands of people to make that drive for what amounted to about 84 seconds of actual play.

Professional sports have been getting a lot of bad press these days, the NFL especially. Yet, despite the noise & the anger, football games are far & away the most popular thing on television & the NBA just signed a $2 billion deal with ABC and ESPN. We are endlessly forgiving of both the individual & institutional failings of professional sports, because anything but would deprive us of something we love.

The three guys who sat behind us at Fenway Park were probably in their late twenties. Derek Jeter played for the Yankees for twenty years. That means, likely, there was never a time (until now) during which their love of Yankees baseball didn’t intertwine with their love of Derek Jeter. Their appreciation for his career goes beyond the stats & the championships, to something maybe inarticulable but best called nostalgia.

It’s the same thing that makes me love Fenway Park, even though the seats are uncomfortable, a bottle of water costs $4, & I have absolutely no interest in the outcome of the game. It’s the same reason we can be collectively aghast at the evidence of brain damage, the lack of cultural sensitivity, or the tone-deafness of dealing with domestic violence, yet still tune in to NFL games at record numbers week after week after week.

Nostalgia is a powerful force, & if there’s a secret to why the big four sports are the big four sports, despite their many flaws, I would argue it’s as much to do with one simple fact as any other: they’ve been around for longer than any of us have been alive.

The emotions of going to Fenway Park with my father when I was seven is embedded in me, & no amount of logic can fully pull that out. It’s the same for the three guys from Brooklyn. It’s the same for you when you watch Monday Night Football.

Reflecting on this, I remembered what Mike Roth, the broadcast director of the NPGL, told me when I asked about his response to Tony’s new pro sport: “I said the following to him: ‘I love you, brother, but the road is littered with the bodies of men who tried to start a league.’”

Why is that? Because: nostalgia.

In his book Sports Illusions, Sports Realities, Leonard Koppett writes:

Children are the first sports audience…There are people who develop fan interest later in life, but they are relatively few, & many of those do so through contact with an interested child…

If you can’t keep converting children into new fans, you can’t stay in business. In this respect, children, who form the purest element of sports-watching enjoyment, may be the means, simply by their existence, of that enjoyment preservation.

The road is littered with failure because, amongst other things, a new league has no nostalgia to bolster it beyond an afternoon’s activity, no reason to look past glaring problems, no benefit of the doubt.

The hardest part about creating a successful league is keeping it together long enough for the children in the stands to become adults who have memories of being taken by their father & of mimicking their favorite player in games at recess, & who now want to take their daughters & sign their sons up for the team.

The hardest part about creating a successful league is that real success won’t come for a generation. The hardest part, then, is patience.