Memorably dark drive home from a game (10/24/07)

Every year about this time, memories of that night come back.

It was 1979, and it was October.

The baseball playoffs were in full swing, as they have been over the past several days.

Connie and I had been big baseball fans from the earliest years of our marriage, making numerous treks to old Bush Stadium in Indianapolis to see the Indians, back when they were a minor league affiliate of the Cincinnati Reds. But with the exception of a visit to Cincy friends and a game in the nosebleed section of the red seats of Riverfront, we hadn't seen much of the big league game together except on television.

Until that day.

The Reds were facing the Pittsburgh Pirates in the National League Championship Series that year, but - somewhat surprisingly - there wasn't a lot of enthusiasm for this particular Reds team. They weren't the Big Red Machine; that was clear. And it was also clear to most fans that the Pirates were going to the World Series.

Maybe that's why the tickets were available.

About mid-afternoon that day, then-publisher Manon Felts returned from a trip downtown to Citizens Bank. With him, he brought news back to the office that Ward Weisel at Citizens had a pair of tickets to that night's NLCS game at Riverfront that he wanted to give away. He wasn't finding any takers, which speaks volumes about the Reds' fortunes that year.

I was on the phone in minutes and a few minutes later had the tickets in my hands. Not only were they playoff tickets. Not only were they free. They were great seats, much closer to the game than we had been able to afford before.

After that, it was a matter of finding a babysitter with little notice so we could make the trip.

The game itself was pretty forgettable. The Pirates won, as most Reds fans suspected they would.

Mostly, there was a pinch-me quality about the whole thing, sort of a zero to 60 mph in 4.2 seconds rush about going from the ordinary to the extraordinary in the course of a single day.

It was late when we headed home, up Colerain Avenue, following U.S. 27 north to Jay County.

And, at first, it seemed as if we'd shifted back from the extraordinary to the ordinary.

Then, somewhere along that dangerous stretch of U.S. 27 between Cincinnati and Oxford, something happened.

Little by little, I found that our headlights were giving us less and less light. At first, it was no big deal.

But by the time we left Oxford, it was clear something was wrong. (The mechanics among you who have guessed it was the alternator belt are correct, though we didn't know it at the time.)

With every mile we drove, the landscape seemed to grow darker and our headlights seemed to grow dimmer.

By the time we reached Liberty, I had a pretty good handle on what was wrong but no idea how to fix it at midnight. We stopped at the courthouse square, turned off the lights and the radio, and revved the engine.

That worked, for about two miles, then we were back into the slow fade toward black.

The rest of the trip home seemed to take forever, and it led to some strange driving on my part.

From about Winchester on, I tucked in behind a trucker, drafting and tailgating and trusting that his lights were better than mine. They had to be. Ours could barely light up the license plates on the back of his semi.

It was after 1 a.m. when we rolled in, and our headlights barely registered on our own garage door. But we were home, and - what the heck - we'd survived our one and only major league playoff game. Even if the Reds had not.

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