By MONTE DUTTON

Friday was such a great day.

I didn’t want to drive to Lugoff, or Elgin, or wherever Lugoff-Elgin is. I wanted Clinton High School to win the Class 2A state championship at home, where their hearts are, with a crowd of folks there.

I dressed for success, or at least luck. It was a bit of a risk to wear my Red Sox cap. It’s bad in Boston this year. But it’s been my team since I was nine years old, and that’s about when I started going to the older Wilder Stadium and playing tackle football behind the stands and on the hill while the Red Devils were playing.  Nowadays, at CHS baseball games, kids throw tennis balls against the back of the dugout, pretending they’re big boys. Occasionally one flies over the dugout and lands on the field while the real game is going on. It is informally traditional for a Clinton player to run out of the dugout, fetch it and throw it back as far he can, mildly sending a message against more errant tosses.

While the Red Devils were bringing to sporting life an old palindrome – “A man! A plan! A canal! Panama!” – I was shooting photos, mostly poor ones, in the dugout. It’s possible I was the only human in the valley thinking of a palindrome while a mighty home run was being launched.

This isn’t exceptional. It’s weird. I wish I didn’t do it. In this age, reading too much is noticeable.

Kids in a dugout still behave the same way as when I was one. They chatter endlessly. It was more of a chant (battuh-battuh-battuh, suwing, battuh!”) when I was patrolling a distant garden in Little League.

Clinton players are fond of exhorting, “Nobody’s better!” This is officially true now in regard to S.C. high-school baseball in the class of 2A.

I thought of what Dan Patrick and his Danettes say on their radio/TV show: “Who’s got it better than us? Nooooobody!” but that’s more of a chant and that was in ancient times. Now the chants are reserved for loud stereos.

During the game, when I should have been snapping more lousy photos, I chatted a while with two football coaching friends, Clinton’s Corey Fountain and Furman’s Clay Hendrix, while a third one, Tommy Spangler, was helping his son, Peyton, the Red Devils’ head coach, in the dugout.

If Keith Richardson had walked up, I could’ve carved a personal Mount Rushmore, in the mound between the baseball and softball fields. Well, in my mind.

I love writing about baseball. I get to know the players on the team. Baseball requires both vigilance and relaxation. The players are more irreverent. Football players are jacked up out of their minds. Basketball players are always running – layups, shots, first half, run into locker room, come back out, lather, rinse, repeat – and they’re as hard to cover as the players they’re guarding on the floor.

All three are great. The slowest sport is the most revealing. The fastest is the least.

In my view, baseball is a perfectly executed squeeze play. Football is downfield blocking. Basketball is ball movement. I wish I could come up with a better term. What’s a ball supposed to do but move?

Strategic distribution. It’ll never catch on.

Shooting through the screen behind the plate during the game, I chatted with an Atlantic Collegiate fan, who told me the Armada hadn’t been playing but two years. I told him Clinton hadn’t been playing but a few over a hundred years. I tried to explain how the team ACA was playing represented the entire local community, not just the school. I pointed out grandfathers watching grandsons. He seemed impressed.

I think Luke Young’s game- and state championship-winning home run was the biggest in Clinton since Anderson Legion’s Jim Rice belted one into the cemetery behind Cavalier Ballpark, the long-gone textile diamond, on a hot afternoon in, oh, 1970. Five years later, Rice was in the bigs. I rode my bicycle to both the games in Clinton. The first was at night. Twelve-year-olds used to do stuff like that.

On Saturday, the talk of the Waffle House was Clinton High. I splurged and had country ham.

Ever since, I’ve mainly been playing guitar and hoping the underdogs won in the college baseball playoffs. I didn’t mind too much that The Citadel lost, even though Furman is utterly defenseless, not having a team and all.

Virginia Commonwealth knocked out Tennessee. In fact, the Vols’ Henry Ford struck out in the ninth inning. I guess it was a Model K.

But seriously, folks …

What I’ve been hemming and hawing up to is that this championship season was important to the players, the coaches, the parents, the grandparents, the fans, the kids banging tennis balls off the dugout, shut-ins and folks who couldn’t get off work, listening on WPCC …

… And to me.

This may be the last sports team I ever write about comprehensively. I made that decision back in the winter. I’ll still write about sports – hell, I write fiction about sports – but it will be more of a blog than a game story. I doubt I’ll be a stranger to either Furman or Clinton High this fall, but I’ve got some new projects that I’ve got to stop putting off. I might even go to some other place.

One has to be professional. Writers don’t cheer. Admittedly, though, I wanted it, so much so that I was experiencing delusions of grandeur when Young stepped to the plate. It wasn’t a delusion, though. It wasn’t an illusion.

In Young’s case, it was the moment of a lifetime to date and a harbinger of things to come. In mine, it was a coincidence.

I’m not superstitious. I do this stuff just in case.

The site is supported by reader contributions. If you’re interested, you can make modest monthly payments on my Patreon page or a one-time contribution via Venmo (@DHKSports).

Or, if you’d like to make a contribution by check or cash, my mailing address is: Monte Dutton, P.O. 221, Clinton, S.C.  29325 (hutdut@outlook.com).

It means a lot to me that you enjoy what I write.

Most of my books are available at Amazon. Two of my novels, Cowboys Come Home and Lightning in a Bottle, are available in audio versions.