Edison Smith did not last long as a sports columnist for the Clark County Gazette.  But while he was there, he did some things that nobody had seen a sports columnist do before.  He wore a tie every day, and he always brought a meal to the games, rather than eat the ballpark food.  But the main thing was the way he wrote.

     He had decided that he was going to write from the inside, from the inside of whatever he was writing about, in this case, the local teams, both the professional teams in the city and the area college teams as well.  "Let us remember," he wrote after the football team had won a tough game against the defending champions, "that tomorrow we will wake up in a hard world.  We will each have to do our own best all over again.  But we can remember that for one night we watched a team show resolve.  We watched a team find something inside themselves that they may or may not have known they had.  It was a good thing to see."

     He did not go to the usual spots after the game with the other sportswriters.  He liked to go home to write his column.  He would look out his window and think of the game he had just seen and the people who cared a great deal about it.  He would think about his responsibility to them.  There were always things he would have done differently.  But he didn't feel much like going over them when he thought of the people waking up in the morning and looking in the newspaper to read about the game.  He wanted them to know that he was on their side, whatever happened in the game.  He was on the side of their belief in the team.  He wanted to write from there, and the only way to do that was to do it every time.  Even when the people were upset because the team wasn't going well, he figured they weren't wholly upset because they were still reading.

     There were times when he felt frustrated himself, but in his room the little lamp at his desk was brighter than a world of darkness, and there was something to be learned from that.  His lamp had in it the truth of the sun coming up again tomorrow on those nights when the team had lost, and there was a place for that in what he wrote.

     The people did not know what to make of him.  They were not used to a sportswriter who was not rising and falling with the team's fortunes.  They were used to the ones who led the charge of rising and falling.

     "Let me explain something," the sports editor said to Edison one day.  "People want to feel like a columnist is crying in his beer right there alongside them when the team loses, only he can also explain exactly why they lost."

     Edison could not drink more than one beer without getting a headache.  He was not sure even if he could, what would be the point of crying in it.  The thing was already something that they shared.  He already knew how he felt, and he had a sense of how the people felt.  The point of writing was to get past that, to get to somewhere beyond those feelings.  He knew that what he was writing was good when it felt like playing the sports themselves.  His own favorite players were the ones whose faces did not change during the games, or even after the games, whether they had won or lost.  There was something still going after the game had ended, and it only made sense for him to pay attention to that because that was the time for him to go to work.  He didn't think he should be crying in any kind of drink just then.

     It went all right during football season.  The team won as many as they lost, and the evenness he wrote with matched their even record.  He wrote in favor of maintaining perspective after both the wins and the losses, and in the long run he was proven correct.  Along the way he received some letters to the editor saying that he was not a true fan.  It hurt his feelings that some of the people would think that way of him.  He wanted to tell them that he was a fan, but he was a fan of the team that was, not the team that he wanted them to be.  It was better to be a fan of a real average team than a hypothetical championship one.

     Basketball season began, and the team lost its first seven games in a row.  Edison wrote a note promising himself that he would not spend one second of the season looking for interesting ways to make fun of them.  It was something a columnist could do, and the people would understand.  The team might even understand.  But he did not want to do it.  The truth was he felt very at home with a bad team.  It was the way it was so clear that belief was an effort-based thing.  Sometimes it grew out of something and sometimes it grew out of nothing but belief.  And he didn't even have to write about the effort; he just had to engage in it, and it would come out in his writing the way he wanted it to.

     He learned the difference between belief and hope.  Hope was the same as crying in one's beer, but belief was the true inside thing.  It was the one thing that could be transferred over to anything after the game had ended.  It could be transferred over to a belief in having just lost.  There was something worthwhile in accepting the results of what had just happened before he sat down to write, without any considerations of mood.  It did not mean being resigned about the next game.

     The athletes he wrote about were millionaires, and he knew that some people saw the columnist's role as the voice of the people rising up to meet them in judgment in the only forum where they were equals.  But, millionaires or not, he did not want to write from a place of standing over them.  He wanted to write from somewhere where he was with them.  He wanted to write from somewhere where he was with the local teams and the opposing ones as well.

     He thought back on how the whole thing had started.  It had started with childhood, and what had been important back then was the game.  As much as he loved the team, it was the game that stayed with him after he had finished feeling happy or sad.  He had even tried the other approach, having the team mean everything, but eventually he would forget about that and remember the game.

     Things came to a head during baseball season, when the team stayed in contention for the playoffs throughout the whole season.  They were a team that he liked, not really able to hit the ball out of the ballpark much, but fast around the base paths and creative.  It came down to the last day.  The game went into extra innings, and in the top of the thirteenth, the opposing team scored a run.  In the bottom of the inning, the team was down to their last strike.  As the pitcher began his wind-up, Edison thought, well, whatever happens, it's been a wonderful year.

     He was not used to a thought feeling as true as the grass and the sun and the game, but that was how it felt.  The pitch was a strike.  The crowd was silent.  Edison was silent too, but he also felt a surge of happiness to be sharing it with everybody.

     At home he sat down to write, and all he could think of was telling the people to remember, to remember every second of the season, the good parts and the bad.  It was what they were going to come around to eventually on their own, but he felt it was important that they start doing it right away.  It was the way to keep the thing going, the grass and the sun and even the game.

     "That had been us back there," he wrote.  "Let us not lose who we were just because the season is over.  There is a way to live with the same spirit that the team showed during the season.  There is a way to put everything that was there into our own days.  There's something that happens when you lose like this on the last day where you wish for just one more game.  I think that game is right in front of us, it's just harder to see.  And each of us has to figure out how to see it on our own."

     The editor begged him to hold off for a while with the column, and to write something else instead.  The people were not ready for it yet, he said.  But Edison said that there was nothing else he wanted to write.

     The editor was right.  The complaints began coming right away.  The nicer ones said that it was not the right time for it.  The other ones said other things.

     Edison did not understand it.  He figured that the people would want to feel the best way they could.  It was what they had done all year, not just for baseball season, but for everything.  He had been a willing participant, but he did not want to participate if they weren't going to take it all the way through.  They knew that they were right there playing alongside the players during the season, but they were not willing to keep their heads up right there alongside them after the season had ended.  It was as though the season had not taught them anything.