I was 8 years old when Reggie Jackson hit back-to-back homers against the Dodgers in the 1977 World Series. That was all this rural Utah kid needed to latch on to the Bronx Zoo. I came home from elementary school just in time to see Bucky Effing Dent go yard in the one-game 1978 playoff against the BoSox. I started collecting baseball cards soon thereafter, scooping up as many Yankees as I could. My first in-person MLB game was Game 1 of the 1999 ALCS, when Bernie Williams’s walkoff homer downed the Sox. The reverberations of “1918” still ring in my ears.
And if the Yankees aren’t the baseball analogue of Duke basketball (or vice versa, in many ways), I’m not sure what is.
"Amazing what a minute can do."