On the night before everything came to an end, a cold front dumped about an inch-and-a-half of rain on New York City. We’d gone up to the Stadium to watch Roger Clemens try and win his 20th game of the season and to basically just catch up over some baseball. As the rain further diluted our already watery beers and the lightning played across the façade of the Bronx County Courthouse, it became clear that this wasn’t going to be a wait-it-out thunderstorm.
When you’re still young, you don’t let a little washout get in the way of your evening out, and in turn-of-the-century NYC, the evenings tended to go long. Rather than taking the dry way out and heading home on the 4 train, we all got caught up in a more southerly impulse and trekked to our friends’ new place down in Battery Park City. We joked about the consumption of “TUDs,” or Totally Unnecessary Drinks until, goddamn, it’s 3:30 already? So we crashed on the couch and on the love seat and on the floor in the baby’s room, which was unoccupied because said baby was still inside his mother.
The blue of the sky that morning was eternal. You know the rest. * * * * *
Twenty-five years on, and there’s a case to be made for the notion that we never fully recovered from the attacks, although sports—and baseball, especially—did their damnedest to usher us all into a sort of New Normal. If it can be argued that those 17 minutes between the tower strikes marked the last gasp of a fading reality—despite the endless visibility, from a street-level view you could almost convince yourself that the first plane was an accident, a self-delusion that would be brusquely erased by United Airlines Flight 175—the quarter-century since has been an exercise in distracting ourselves from the metanarrative. Sports still do a lot of heavy lifting, although as a cultural phenomenon, they’ve never been more efficacious than they were in the weeks directly afterward.
