A few beautiful autumns ago, I drove Daugus the dog down the long, worrisome road for her final visit to the vet. It was already past time to do it. She was on serious pain meds, yowling such at night that you rarely had a dream that wasn’t soaked in guilt or regret.

Once we got to the vet, she somehow rebounded to her old self for a few moments- tail wagging, a small smile that we thought was long gone found it’s way to her grey, scarred face. She looked up at me as if to say:

Really? This is what you are going to do to me? My oldest friend?

But the die was already cast at that point. All the for/against cases had been made.

We called in the closer.

I felt like you are supposed to feel for the next several days, which is to say lousy. Not only sad, but lousy. Like a 162 pound cloud with a very short rope had been tied to my shoulder.

And so it is with the end of baseball season.  And no, nobody’s heart will stop beating- though it can get pretty close to a crawl in the bottom of the ninth.

Yeah, my team lost. Blew a comfortable, clean lead with only three outs to get. They were home free. And they had earned it, playing brilliant, beautiful, smart, gritty, tough baseball for the last two weeks, calling up everything they had. And then Moore.

Alas, though, it was like the end of The Dirty Dozen when the guy stands up in the jeep and yells ‘we made it’ and then gets shot in the back.

That movie also left me feeling some deep ennui and lousy-ness for days because of that scene and also the one where Jim Brown gets it. I still hope it will turn out differently when I watch it again. It doesn’t.

Yeah, the Giants season is over. Is that cause enough for mild to moderate melancholy? Sure.  But the lousy-ness, that’s from something else.

We all lose. Anybody that plays loses. I’m starting to see that the way in which the loss comes matters more than the loss itself. Having the rug yanked out from under you by your own doing or by those you count on, for example, can carry that deep, painful sting we spend entire lives avoiding.

Unlike Daugus, though, baseball will rise again. And again. And again. And I’ll be ready at some point. Just not today.