I’m only here tonight because baseball is not America’s pastime. It’s the kind of game that your parents send you to play when you’re five, and the one you’re screaming at on television from your couch with you’re fifty. Tonight, however, it’s one of those games where the family in front of you stands every ten minutes to bring their daughter to the restroom or grab a snack, and the guy to your right becomes further inebriated each time the Pirates bat in a run. Soon enough, he doesn’t know which team he’s cheering for.

I look to my left and notice my fiancé Cory is back on his tablet, answering work emails. Cory hates baseball—he thinks it’s drawn out, boring, and that I’m crazy to go to as many games as I do. I’ve been to 498 in my lifetime; Cory hates that, too, and that’s why I love him.

I don’t try to distract him from work—he could not care less if Anthony Rizzo hit a foul ball onto the empty seat beside him. It’s a chilly night at Wrigley Field, but I have on my old denim shorts designated specifically for baseball games. My brown hair is pulled back into a messy ponytail, and my makeup is just starting to fade from the crazy day at a job I’m obligated to say I enjoy.

Rizzo hits a fly ball into right field, opposite from where we sit, and the man on my right cheers both before and after the outfielder makes the catch. The booing of the Cubs fans rains down on us, and I simply crack a smile.

“These fuckin’ calls, man,” my right-hand neighbor slurs out. I make the mistake of catching his eye. “You a Cubs fan?” he asks.

I evaluate the man a bit more, since he’s directly addressing me. He has blond hair with small speckles of gray, but he doesn’t look much older than me, now that I think of it. There is an open seat between us, but I start to feel as though my bubble is close to rupturing. The bubble that houses Cory and me.

I shake my head. “Just a baseball fan.”

The remark seems to throw the man off. It’s meant to. “A baseball fan?”

I give him a quick nod and then return my attention to the game. “That’s right.”

“You a transplant, then?”

“Nope, born and raised in Chicago.”

He contemplates my answer for a moment, and then extends his hand. “I’m Keith.”

I respond with my name. “Maggie.” Keith nods at Cory, who is still too absorbed in his email to notice our exchange. “What about him? He a homegrown hero, as well?”

I chuckle. “He’s from New Orleans.”

Keith nods and then mutters under his breath, “Fuckin’ transplants!”

After a short time he distracts himself with another beer, and I focus my gaze on Andrew McCutchen, who’s up to bat for Pittsburgh.

“Two-two pitch, and McCutchen pops it up into center field. Fowler is there to make the catch!” the announcer yells through the portable radio that I like to carry.

Keith boos.

I was eleven years old when my father placed a red, blue, and white cap on my head and told me I was going to be a baseball fan. Wrigley Field was just a drive away, he’d said, taking my hand and leading me to the car, where my mother waited. My family had never shown an interest in the sport before; we lived in the suburbs of Chicago—Northbrook to be exact—but any talk of the Cubs amongst relatives resulted in either mild cursing or complete apathy.

Since Corey Patterson’s homerun during the second inning of my very first game, I had done nothing but sulk. The air was warm, and the crowd’s enthusiasm attempted to envelop me like the ballpark cotton candy that was stuck to everything; this included the three-year-old’s hair in front of us. A vendor had passed by three times now, trying to coax us into purchasing just one little swirl of pink and blue. “A bite-sized candy for a bite-sized girl,” he’d said to me on Round Two.

But I, Maggie Duschene, was not a bite-sized girl. I also didn’t want to be here tonight. In just a total of two months, my father had been laid off, Mom was slowly becoming obsessed with our bills, and she had developed a heightened interest in the amount of alcohol Dad imbibed each week. On top of all that, we were now going to like baseball. There was something to be said for ignoring a facet of life until the moment you most desperately needed it.

In the eyes of my parents, baseball was going to save my family. It was going to become the glue that kept us together. Luckily, I knew better, and I was simply counting the days.

I learned my first lesson about the Cubs during the bottom of the third inning. Derek Lee was up to bat and Dad sat back, placing an arm around my shoulder.

“You know the Cubs haven’t won a World Series since 1908?” he asked.

I eyed him sideways. Perhaps we shouldn’t discuss such things in front of actual fans.

“It’s true,” he said, smiling. “Been just about a century since they were the champs.”

The lessons and tidbits continued. Every few minutes, Dad pointed to something on the scoreboard across the field from us, explaining what a number meant, or a symbol. By the fourth inning, I had learned that an error occurred when a play that should have been made wasn’t. By the top of the fifth, I understood that the Cubs were part of something called the National League, and within that, the Central Division. By the Seventh Inning Stretch, I was informed that we would be returning again tomorrow night.

As it turned out, season tickets to the Cubs were the pity gift of former coworkers when you were laid off. More facts.

The summer progressed. My father made it a routine to rattle off extra information he thought I needed, and I decided to humor him. I pictured him scouring the Internet, trying to understand how baseball worked. How it evolved, how it breathed, grew, triumphed, and failed. I wondered how much further he would go—how much energy it would take to keep up the charade that baseball could fix everything.

Cory nudges me. “What the hell is an RBI?” he asks. “Everyone around us keeps saying it.”

I’m a little surprised by the question, but then again, Cory likes knowing things. He’s an analyst at a bank. It must upset him to some extent, trying to understand a term that everyone around him seems to know.

“It stands for Runs Batted In,” I tell him, then I smirk. “I’ll let you figure out the rest.”

He rolls his eyes and shoots me a grin in return. “Thanks, but I’ll pass on the homework.”

Homework was never his thing anyway, not even at Northwestern, where we met.

I was seventeen when I received my acceptance to the university—eighteen when I enrolled on a full ride. Mom was glad she could take what little tuition money she had managed to save up and put it toward our living expenses. We had long moved out of Northbrook.

In my first class, we were asked to say something interesting about ourselves. Most students introduced themselves and then talked about their three-legged pets, or their most recent volunteer trips to places like Honduras. When the circle got to me, however, I kept it simple. “I’m Maggie Duschene,” I began, “and I’ve been to 457 baseball games in my life.”

Most of the games following “the year of the season tickets” were courtesy of my childhood friends and their parents, but I didn’t add that information. The classroom fell silent, and with each passing moment, I anticipated a response. Finally, the boy sitting across from me whispered, loud enough for the class to hear, “Not the fucking Cubs, right?”

The class laughed, and I joined in. The boy who had broken the ice for me was Cory, and by the end of the year I thought I was in love with him. By the end of second year, I knew I was.

Someone a few rows down from us snaps their fingers and, within seconds, my mind stops wandering from the game at hand. I crane my neck, attempting to locate the source of the sound. Before I can, though, Cory shuts his tablet and takes my hand in his. “What inning is it?” he asks. But it’s not out of interest.

“Just started the fifth,” I reply. “Not yet.”

He nods, understanding that we’ll leave during the top of the sixth. We always do.