"Son, is your sneaker on fire?"
At a major league game, my father discovered what burning marijuana smelled like. Thirty-five years ago this spring, during a sunny but cold, midweek April matinee at Shea Stadium, I identified for him the byproduct emitted from performance-enhancing joints shared between Mets aficionados two rows behind us, adding yet another chapter to the already colorful bond baseball forged among our typically dysfunctional, large Irish-Catholic family.
Full disclosure: I was raised a Mets fan, but if you ask me to cite my all-time greatest sports memory, it was watching from the press box as our eldest son, then 16, celebrated the Mets' implosion on the final day of the 2007 season from seats on the Scoreboard Porch, paving the way for the Phillies to win the first of their five straight division championships.