I found him in left field staring up at the scoreboard. There's no other scoreboard in the world like the one in Fenway Park. It stretches 40 feet along the base of the Green Monster, the numbers painted in white on squares of wood large as chess boards, and it's the only scoreboard in America that's still updated by hand. I daydreamed about that scoreboard a lot during my brief (but miserable) stint with the Padres this Spring. Sometimes, late in the game when we were hopelessly out-hit, I would catch a glimpse of the AL scores and imagine that enormous scoreboard proudly proclaiming the Red Sox victors in front of 33,000 cheering fans. I pictured Manny playing deep in left, backing up past the warning track until those towering numbers dug into his spine to steal a base hit. And when things were really bad (as they usually were), I would conjure that scoreboard in my mind, and I would think that if I were in Fenway right now, it wouldn't matter that I was 1 for 5 on the night, or that the starting pitcher couldn't throw a strike to save his own soul, because somehow the bats would come alive, the hits would find their way through, the team would persevere, and that scoreboard would tell the whole story.

So when I found him there in left field staring up at that magnificent creation, I understood what he felt. Because I had never imagined that scoreboard spelling out defeat. But then again, I had never carried the team on my back; I had never held myself accountable for the loss. I was just a local utility boy, I wasn't the next coming of Carl Yastzremski. I'd never wanted to be.

"It should have been us tonight," he said to me without even a backwards glance. "It should have been us, Lou."

"We did our best," I told him. "They were better. You did all you could."

"I went oh-for."

"You drove in the only run."

"We didn't win."

And that, in the opinion of Nomar Garciaparra, was that. At the end of the day, all the strike-outs double-plays in the world couldn't save us when the hits ran dry. It was something that rarely happened these days, but when it did, it was a punch to the teeth.

"I just want to give these people a parade," Nomar said softly. "I just want to make them proud."

"You do, Nomar," I told him. "Boston is proud of you."