There Is Always Tomorrow

A little over a year ago, I was a sports columnist/editorial leadership on my high school's newspaper staff. I had the dream sportswriting high school job, a back page column (a la Rick Reilly) that was well-read and a little controversial. I had a lot of fun writing my columns and was getting ready to explain to people why I loved writing sports.

There is little doubt that some in the general public believe that sports writing is unimportant. I was getting ready to explain in my last column why I loved sportswriting and about the athletes at our school whose stories had been worth telling that year. I wanted to tell people that sports was not all about the game; it's the athletes behind the game (and their stories) that make it all worthwhile. I felt strongly about this and, the day after I wrote my column, I got bad news. A friend of mine named Andrew, and a fellow sports editor with me the previous year, had died.

It was coming up on baseball season, his favorite time of year, and I was preparing for the endless stream of hopeful texts he would send after each Royals game. He was a die-hard Royals fan who rocked the baby blue almost daily and couldn't get the game off his mind. He saw himself as the underdog and, in a way, lived vicariously through an underdog baseball team from April to October.

Ditching my original column idea, I began writing about him. My last column would be my saddest, but it ended up being my most important. I ended up writing about how much passion Andrew had for the Royals, how he never gave up hope, and how he was buried in his trademark baby blue jersey. I talked about how much our opinions on sports differed, but how we became friends because we found out we had one thing in common: we loved to argue with each other.

After the column was published, I remembered a blog he had maintained for a couple months the previous summer. I went back and read it. It oozed hope for a team that he knew had none. A few months later, his family and I put together a volleyball tournament in his honor. It raised some money; but in the midst of putting the tournament together, his mother and sister were diagnosed with the same aggressive disorder that had killed Andrew. Through it all, though, they maintained hope.

On Monday, while watching the Royals forfeit a 4-1 lead when Zack Greinke stepped off the mound, I tried to remember the optimism that his family had. I still keep up with his mom and, even now, she roots for the Royals with hope. Seeing his family, knowing that they could die unannounced as he did, has given me a whole new perspective on the Royals.

Their situation is hopeless, just like that of Andrew's family, but that doesn't mean that I should be hopeless, too. So, every time I watch a Royals game this season, I'll try to remember something he wrote about the Royals.

"There is always tomorrow," he said.

Yes, in baseball, there always is.