"It's great to be young and a Yankee."

I can probably count on 1 hand the number of times I've really enjoyed myself at a Yankee game where the Yanks ended up losing.
1.) May 17, 2008: 7-4 (Mets)
2.) April 27, 2007: 11-4 (Boston)
3.) April 17, 2008, 7-5 (Boston)
4.) July 9, 2005: 7-8 (Cleveland)

(In that order. I think.)

My sister may take issue with #2 since that's the game where some brontosaurus of a chick punched her the face. Well, it was fun up until that. But having an entire section as an audience to the total indignification of 3 awful Boston fans...that part was cool. And no sooner had one of em decked my sis than the stadium police were on them like white on rice. As always, the sight of Boston fans being police-escorted out of the stadium is unassailably refreshing. Like when the drunk train wreck finally leaves the party and you don't have to deal with the obnoxious liability that is his/her presence.

But I digress. The point is, I can now add May 2, 2009 to the list of ADLs*. (I just noticed that all my ADLs are in May and April. I guess I get progressively more unforgiving and intense as the season wears on, and it gets to the point where I could be in seats behind the dugout on a 75degree day game with my college roommates and an unlimited supply of beer and hotdogs, and if the Yanks lose...I'd have to take the rest of the afternoon off to sit in darkness as I dissect the events leading up to the unduly tragic defeat.)

Yesterday was my first game at GNH, and even though weather.com predicted rainy/cloudy skies all afternoon, it was stunningly perfect and sunny.

Me, my friend from college that I met in a play in which I was an Indian with an Irish brogue and she was a Mexican, my sister, and Keith spent the first few innings in conventional game-watching mode.**

About 5 innings into the game, the intense focus on the tied game somehow shifted when Krista returned with a bag of popcorn and accompanying giant tub for which popcorn was meant to be housed.

But to 2 people with the maturity of Calvin and Hobbes, the last thing that thing was being used for was popcorn. Krista and my sis had no sooner returned to the seats then than the bucket was on my head. (A hat!)

Keith=more creative. He was darting back the concession stand mumbling something about needing ice for his free's bum knee. (Awwww.) Even though it wasn't intended to nurse my bum knee, the beer bucket he created with it was infinitely more favorable. Gone was the everpresent concern of 7th inning last call. No more of the is-this-warm-beer-or-my-backwash guessing game. No more missing an at-bat just to wait on line or flag down a vendor.

Genius. Pure genius. The sheer paragon of the system was confirmed when Keith made an 8-word assertion that I've NEVER heard him say, EVER:

"I got a good feeling about this game." (When we were down 8-1. We could've been up 8-1 and he normally would have been screaming about how the Yanks' may as well say goodbye the playoffs with that kind of showing.)

To make this entire initiative even more wildly amusing, we started hearing other people going up to the concession stand ordering the "beer bucket."

So if they start selling those things, or--the infinitely more likely scenario--you start seeing signs underscoring the lack of beer bucket availability or existence--you'll know the drunk entrepeneur masterminds behind the origin.

Which also was the backbone of the sole (yet comparatively inconsequential) downside of the afternoon: I can't really recap the game with any degree of accuracy. The only comment I can make about CC Sabathia is that at one point me and Keith mistook the cotton candy selling vendor for CC and mused over how he was going to make it back to the mound before the bottom of the inning when everyone knows that fat people can't run that fast.

I will say the new stadium is amazing, even despite the partially obstructed view from Section 239. I couldn't really explore or walk around because of the leg, but everything was just a lot bigger and more open and more comfortable. If I was wearing that brace monstronsity in the old stadium, I would have had to staple my leg to my sleeve or use the shoulder of the person sitting in front of me as an ottoman.

(OR, I can take the beer bucket brainchild one step further.)

The rest of the day was the standard dream-sequence of events that is the inevitable result of day-time drinking. I met Nick Swisher and said arguably the most ridiculous babbling of words ever to escape my mouth. My sister threw the trump card on me by telling him how surprised she was that he was the only Yankee not picked up in her fantasy league.

At around midnight, I was at the "geeeez what time is it? The bars must be closing soon.." disorientation phase. I passed out sans brace and woke up with a brutally sore, unbending knee, and half a chocolate donut stuck on my face.

The good news is that the Yankee game was PPD, which offset the implications of the bad news which was that I woke up too late to set my fantasy roster for the day.



*Awesome Despite Loss

** My sis tempers her own active interest in game for the sake of monitoring the present company with penchant for questionable stadium behavior. Said company, not having yet reached that point, continues to watch game normally, while unconsciously jeopardizing self-control by drinking a lot.