Hughie King corrected me the other day, as he should have, after I’d retrofitted John Howard Payne’s “Home, Sweet Home” with more modern lyrics.

Thing was, said our village historian, Payne’s grandfather never lived in Home, Sweet Home, as Wikipedia (it will be my downfall yet) had reported, and that while it was a fact John Howard had visited East Hampton as a child — he wrote of having been afraid of the geese around Goose (now Town) Pond — no one knows exactly where he stayed.

Anyway, wherever it was, there was no place like it.

I admit it, I do at times (only at times?) play fast and loose with the facts — annoying impediments, I find, on the path toward Greater Truths. I may stand corrected, but not for long — an apt motto, I’ll warrant, for a journalist.

In this regard I’m reminded of the coat of arms my father had emblazoned on the whitewashed front wall of his castle in (or rather, near) Spain: “Aquila Muscas Non Captat.” Which he translated as, “The Eagle Does Not Stoop to Catch Flies.”

Maybe that was why I never made it to the Major Leagues.

Let’s see what Wikipedia says about it. . . . It says “aquila muscas non captat” means not to sweat the small things. Good advice, I’d say. In fact, our favorite family psychologist has that pinned to the door of his office. “Don’t sweat the small things . . . they’re all small things.”

I mean, given that there are an estimated 100 to 200 billion galaxies in the universe, each of which has hundreds of billions of stars (and does that figure include the 647 galaxies discovered the other day?), how can we presume that we and our problems are not small things?

Does it follow, then, that every problem, every failing we humans have is amenable to solution — or if not to solution, at least to amelioration?

This earth, I think, could indeed become home, sweet home should our arrogance be allayed and our collective minds put to it.

Do I stand corrected? By any sitting in judgment? Good, then, I’m off for a walk.

A phrase came to my mind last week. I have not thought of this phrase in the six years since I moved back here to the East End, and yet there it was, quite unexpectedly. Before I tell you the phrase I need to give you a bit of background.

I grew up here on the East End, in Montauk and East Hampton. I graduated from East Hampton High School. My father chose to live out here because of the surf, moving to Montauk in the late ’60s to raise a young family. Both my parents were “military brats,” and they spent their formative years living in Hawaii, where my dad met my mother and also learned “the sport of kings,” surfing. My parents owned the first surf shop in Montauk in the early ’70s called He’e Nalu, before its time, as my father often says.

Growing up, the television show “Magnum P.I.” was a weekly highlight in our household due more to the scenery of palm trees and aloha shirts than for Tom Selleck’s cultured mustache and sweet car. Our family took only one “big” holiday and that was to Hawaii for three weeks. I had just started 10th grade. I fell in love with the place and dreamed of going back.

After I graduated I did a short stint in the Marine Corps, and when I was 19 that dream became reality and I spent my first winter in Hawaii. I ended up spending the next 20 years living on the islands.

Hawaii is known as the Aloha State. Aloha literally means “breath of life.” Locals will say aloha as a greeting and as a farewell or goodbye. Aloha is a way of living and treating each other with love and respect. The spirit of aloha permeates the culture, and is a driving force in government, business, and everyday island life. Aloha can be conveyed from a distance by a smile and a “shaka” — the shaka more commonly known here on the mainland as the “hang loose” symbol, formed by closing the hand then sticking out the pinky and thumb, giving a slight wave.

As a newcomer to the islands, aside from the incredible colors and tropical fragrances, you may feel overwhelmed by the number and combinations of vowels in the names of places and streets. The Hawaiian alphabet contains five vowels (A, E, I, O, U), seven consonants (H, K, L, M, N, P, W), and the ’okina, which is a backward apostrophe and signifies a slight break in the sound. There are other small nuances but when you see a word such as “humuhumunukunuku’apua’a,” “kalanianiole,” or “Kawaihau,” I think you may get my point. My first reaction to these strange words was to make fun of them in my own form of Hawaiian speak, “hawakahakahikihikiho, wikiwikitikitiki.” My father reprimanded me, “Learn to say the words correctly!” This was my first important lesson in aloha.

As much as the spirit of aloha permeates the Hawaiian culture, there is a very strong sense of localism that can at times be extreme. The first time Capt. James Cook, credited with “discovering” the Hawaiian Islands for the Europeans, came ashore, his arrival was celebrated. Cook and his men were lavished with gifts of food, crops, livestock, and women. Upon his return to the islands he was bludgeoned to death before he reached dry sand.

There is a Hawaiian word that encapsulates this localism and brings me to the phrase that inspired this narrative. The word itself is “haole,” pronounced in pigeon form “how-lee,” which literally means “no breath.” Traditionally this word was used to describe those of European descent or foreigners. Haole can be used in merely a descriptive manner or can be used as an ethnic slur.

The word implies that the foreigner is ignorant to local ways and literally has no spirit. This is quite the antithesis of aloha.

What I learned in Hawaii, often called the melting pot of the Pacific, is, aside from blood lineage, being local is not so much measured by length of time or ownership of property but by the degree to which one assimilates the spirit of aloha. As a newcomer, aloha starts with humility and respect. Not just respect for others, but respect for the “ ’aina” (meaning land, pronounced “I-na”). An awareness of one’s surroundings and a big smile go a long way.

So, in the words of the hugest Hawaiian in a crowded surf lineup, the phrase that resurfaced in my mind was “F’ing haoles, beat it!”

Have an aloha day.

Matthew Charron is The Star’s digital imaging specialist.

I am dying, Egypt, dying — of the pollen and the ticks — but life, at least as I find it today, is wonderful, now that the sun is out and we’re in the trees’ embrace.

Our daughter from Temecula is with us, pregnat, as she used to say, and we’re grillin’ tonight. Wally, her husband, will teach us, and I will pay close attention inasmuch as outdoor cookery is generally considered a manly thing, a rite of passage that has come along quite late in my life.

Mary, who’s never forgotten the orange roughy I cooked outside for her mother and her in 1986, recently bought the grill — one fit for the middle class, not overly ornate — and, sparing me the trouble, bless her, put it together. I react viscerally when people tell me that all I have to do is “read the manual.” I don’t like manuals. I don’t like to follow instructions, especially when they accompany diagrams, and I also tend to dismiss as pettifogging any disputes as to rules, as when Mary accuses me of cheating in backgammon.

“You hold me in too high esteem,” I say. “I’m not clever enough to cheat.”

“Trust but verify,” she says.

“Trust but vilify,” I say.

I will make it up to her. I will become, with the bright, shiny utensils Johnna and Wally gave us, a man of parts when it comes to barbecuing — “barbe-a-cul-ing,” as a French wit once put it to me. I know it is something I should do, that I’m programmed to do. It goes way back, she says, to when we were hunters and gatherers and women nursed the children and tended the hearth and cooked the food and made and washed the clothes and kept things clean and. . . .

“Really, not much has changed,” she said, “except instead of spearing wildebeests, you’re whacking tennis balls.”

“Don’t you worry ’bout a thing,” I tell her. “Soon you’ll be saying, just like they do on WLNG, ‘And thank you, Jack, for charring.’ ”

About two years after my mother died, at the unfair age of 58, my dad, who was in his early 60s, found himself pursued by a phalanx of age-appropriate widows.

When I say pursued, I’m not kidding. Hardly a day went by when he was not invited to a home-cooked dinner, a reading or a talk, a Broadway show or a Carnegie Hall concert for which they just happened to have an extra ticket, and on and on.

I remember one woman who used to run into him “accidentally” at least twice a week. Also one who requested the pleasure of his company for an entire winter’s Metropolitan Opera series (he didn’t accept); another who turned up in a nearby cabin after he told her he was going on a cruise, and yet another who actually bought an apartment in his same building.

I am an only child. After my mother’s death my father used to call me every night precisely at 6. “Hi, baby, what’s new?” “What’s new with you, Dad?” and out it would come: “Well, I was looking forward to a quiet evening, but (Florence/Serena/Mildred/Bel) called and suggested we take in a movie, so. . . .”

“Bel,” by the by, was Bel Kauffman, who wrote a wildly popular novel called “Up the Down Staircase” that nobody today remembers unless they’re about 103, which she was when she died last year. She had a career as a teacher in the New York City public schools and, after the book was published, financial security for the rest of her long life. I seem to recall that she wanted an escort, not a husband, and Dad, whose 32-year marriage to my mother was one of consummate contentment, seemed fine with that.

And then there was Faye.

I blame my Aunt Maybelle for Faye. They were friends from high school, but then Faye got married and went to live in Texas. When they reconnected many years later, after Faye’s husband died and she moved back east, Maybelle gave her, oh, at least a day to settle in before calling her widower brother to set them up.

Texas, which at the time seemed to me about as close to the real world as Mars, really did a number on Faye. She was as different from my mother — who was stylish in a classic ’50s way, great with design and decoration and entertaining though not so much with crossword puzzles, dark-haired with a striking white streak in front, absolutely unaffected, and happiest when Dad and I were happy — as two women could be. Faye, “five-foot-two, eyes of blue,” had platinum hair, an I-dare-you-to-disagree attitude, a broad Southern accent that faded when she was “all riled up,” as often happened when the talk was about something that didn’t interest her, and, for my lawyer-father — high-minded, conservative, a wearer of vests — a come-hither crinkling of the eyes and an inexplicable, to me, attraction.

She was altogether unlike the other women of his generation and crowd. I suppose that had a lot to do with it.

They’d known each other for several months when he caught me by surprise one day with a question.

“What do you think of Faye?”

The question seemed casual — he wasn’t given to subtlety — and I answered it casually, without thinking.

“Not much.”

He didn’t say anything.

“I mean, she’s smart and pretty and everything, but there’s something, I don’t know, fake about her.”

I don’t remember any more of what was said — probably there was no more — but a few months later he told me Faye was going to marry a judge in New Jersey. That was the last time I heard her name mentioned, except for when Aunt Maybelle, a world-class guiltmaker, told me Faye had fallen very hard for Dad and had got engaged on the rebound.

My father lived another 10 or 12 years. He seemed older, now that I think of it, after the thing with Faye, as if some spark had gone out. He never remarried.

Looking back from a distance of decades, knowing with every year that passes a few more friends who have lost their spouses or longtime partners and seeing them ill with loneliness, I find myself thinking more and more about that conversation. I know that lots of children object to a parent’s remarriage for all sorts of reasons, not all of them bad, and every case is different, but I wonder.

Why did I say what I said? And why did he ask me?

Irene Silverman is The Star’s editor at large. She is at large in Amagansett for the time being.

Post-Memorial Day, it is a little difficult to decide what to write about. There are so many choices: traffic, noise, events missed, yard work.

Among other options are a pony on the beach at a kid’s birthday party, which drew the baffled attention of East Hampton Town Marine Patrol, and a maddening Montauk Highway tie-up on Sunday evening caused by the Cyril’s Fish House parking guys.  

But the thing that I think will stick with me as far as the first weekend of the 2015 season is concerned has to do with three young bike-riding visitors and an endangered plant.

Sunday afternoon, a little after 1, I was driving home on Cranberry Hole Road and noticed a bicycle on its side at the edge of the pavement. A young woman astride another bike stood nearby. As I got closer, I saw that a second woman, who I thought was not much older than 20, had crawled under the pines and  seated herself in a sprawl of small white flowers, apparently picking something. A young man waited in the grass by the side of the road a couple of hundred feet up the way. I thought about warning them about the ticks and the poison ivy, but it was clear that it was too late.

As it turned out, my sister, Bess, had passed these three only moments earlier. As we readied the kids for a trip to Montauk to play miniature golf, we laughed, rather unkindly, about what we had seen. “Ticks up the wazoo!” “Ha, hipsters!” That kind of thing.

Loading the car, with three kids in the back and my sister in the passenger seat, I headed east, turning onto Napeague Meadow Road. Near the big curve, where a new osprey nest on a pole is occupied, we saw them again. This time, a spray of pink flowers was bobbing from a backpack one of the women was wearing.

Almost simultaneously, Bess and I exclaimed, “Lady slippers!”

“Stop the car,” Bess cried, “I’m going to give them what for.”

Lady slippers, members of the orchid family, are protected in New York, as are the state’s other native orchids, all of which are rare. Cutting them from public land, like a road right of way, is a state law violation that can come with a fine. Even cutting them on private property is supposed to require the landowner’s permission. Anyway, in my opinion, a beautiful flower on the side of the road should be left for all to see. 

With a kid in the back of the car shouting “You are an idiot!” at the flower-snatchers, I had to roll up the windows, so I could not hear exactly what my sister said. Still steaming about it when she got back in the car, she said her remonstrations were answered by a repeated, weak, “Uh, okay.”

Judging from their blank expressions, it is  unlikely that they learned a lesson, although that is impossible to know. But they will not soon forget the encounter, that’s for sure.

And the season’s only just begun.

What to do with the sunny Sunday of a long holiday weekend? 

Well, for starters, I had to coordinate with the workers who arrived bright and early to fix our dilapidated old picket fence and plant some privet to hide the back neighbors’ pool from view. Then I wanted to cut and bring in some lilacs before their bloom faded. Also, I needed a few flowering plants for the three ceramic pots on the patio, and that meant I had to make a run to the crazy-busy nursery — where everyone and their mother was out buying hydrangeas and roses, it seemed — to get more potting soil. And then I had to thumb through cookbooks to decide what salads I was going to make for a family birthday dinner . . . and then shop for whatever ingredients were necessary, then whip the salads up . . . then off to an early cocktail reception, and then, by 6:30, the birthday party itself.

Because of all these plans — which somehow felt like a lot to do at one time, even though it wasn’t really — I blew off my usual yoga session on Sunday morning, for the third time in as many weeks. The deep-breathing exercises, not to mention the “letting go,” just weren’t on the agenda last weekend.

I decided on pilaf, and — while taking inventory of the fridge — noticed we were lacking quite a few pantry basics, including milk and Ajax, so I started a grocery list. Roasted asparagus seemed like it might be a nice companion to the pilaf, and I also had to find fruit for the fruit salad my husband had signed on to make for the birthday. The shopping list grew.

It was no longer early when I set out for the supermarket. Trying to make the most of a dwindling day, I decided to forget the Ajax and go straight to Citarella. It was, of course, jam-packed, too. Anticipating mayhem, no doubt, the management had hired attendants to stand by the parking lot entrance, directing cars. One of them, a young man with a clipboard, encouraged me to edge into a very narrow spot. When did shopping turn into such a brouhaha? Somehow, the checkers at the cash registers were still smiling. They told me it had been even crazier there on Saturday.

Making my way home, I followed the loop past the post office to Egypt Lane and stopped in a line of traffic at the light. Unfortunately, that is when my car — to my horror — somehow slowly slid into the Jeep ahead of me! The driver jumped out and, running toward me, shouted, “What the hell are you doing?” I had jammed on the brakes in enough time to avoid any damage, however, and he seemed mollified when I answered meekly that I was sorry. 

The truth is that Memorial Day weekend has never been my favorite moment of the year, no matter how fine the weather or how sweet-smelling the lilacs. Everyone arriving in town en masse seems determined to play — I think the term is “frantically relaxing” — but, like many of us who live here, I’m not on that wavelength right now. Summer is coming, but, for us, it’s not the start of vacation season but the start of work, work, work season. Maybe we can relax in, say, October? Something tells me I should get back to yoga class. 

So, what’s so bad about a man wearing a fedora? To listen to some, men in fedoras in the Town of East Hampton are a sure sign that civilization as we know it has come to an end.

“Here they come, with their fedoras.” You would think, the way people talk, that the fedora-wearing crowd was a bunch of weird cultists instead of young people having fun. I don’t get it.

Maybe it’s because I am older than many of the people I work and associate with. When I was a child, my father wore a fedora. The sight of a man in a fedora is not alien to me.

The subways that I rode when I was growing up used to have signs that warned men to hold onto their hats. One such sign was at the Third Avenue end of the I.R.T. station for the 7 train from Queens. (If I really wanted to date myself here, I would tell you that I.R.T. stands for Interborough Rapid Transit Company, the first subway operator in New York City, which opened in 1904, though I was not there for the opening.)

That sign showed a man holding onto his hat, as I recall. The reason for the warning was that every time a westbound train burst into the station, there would be a huge gust of wind that would blow straight up the long escalator to 42nd Street. Goodbye, fedora!

As I said, my dad wore a hat, as did most men. Just take a look at photographs of crowds from the 1950s or earlier. Practically every man is in a hat.

Then came the 1960s and beyond. My hair, as with that of most young men, was long, long, longer. A hat over that? Forget about it!

And so, the fedora disappeared, as did the cute signs in the subway. (My favorite sign, looking back, was the one in the cars that read, “Little enough to ride for free, little enough to ride your knee,” accompanied by a drawing of a happy mommy with an even happier baby bouncing on her knee.)

Hats are civilized. There are rules regarding hats. When you walk into the East Hampton Town Justice courtroom, you darn well better have that hat in your hand and not on your head or you will get a swift reminder from one of the guards.

Recently, I walked into White’s Drug and Department Store in Montauk and tried on a fedora. Nice. I plunked down the 15 bucks and went on over to the other side.

I am now one of them, and you can tip your hat to that.

T.E. McMorrow is a reporter for The Star who covers police and courts, among other things.

“All of a sudden, it got more exciting — don’t you feel that too?” I said the Friday of Memorial Day weekend to Jen Landes, our arts editor. “I mean, our chances of being in an accident have just increased a thousandfold! All of a sudden, the stakes are raised, the level of intensity has soared. As in wartime or in lovemaking, or in lovemaking during wartime, the blood is flowing, no longer congealed by winter’s icy clutch. In the next few weeks I’m going to be really alive, giving full rein to my emotions rather than simply going through the motions.”

And with that, I was out the door and wheeling into traffic just in time to see a woman who’d rolled through a stop sign near the flagpole remonstrating vehemently with blameless drivers heading east and west on Main Street. “It is you, madam, you who are at fault!” I was about to call out, but she, still raging, was gone, thus denying to me what Philip Roth has called the ecstasy of sanctimony. Choler interruptus.

And then, of course, there’s the local news of late: They say they own us, that they can do what they want with their property, they say they can make as much noise as they want on arriving and taking off. Oh, ecstasy of sanctimony! Does not the communal good exert a more worthy claim to conscience than the license invoked by “haves” equating license with liberty? The gorge rises, the heart pounds, the tongue lashes. This is really living, and whom do we have to thank for it, for having revivified our torpid souls? Them! So, I urge you, don’t rush to judgment — even though it’s fun. Rather than vilified, they are more to be pitied perhaps. Working so hard as they do, they have little time to relax and think of the greater good. And so I say, as the season begins, “Honk if you love peace and quiet.”

Having had a taste of excitement, then, we decided to go whole hog, and spend a day in the city. Soon we were swept up in it, in the huddled masses, yearning for falafels.

But, wonderful to tell, there was ease there, a calm we’d almost forgotten. The sun was out in the city and it was, we agreed, as we walked along, a nice place to be. We struck up conversations easily, wished others well in parting, and returned here at peace, our heart rates having returned to normal and our sense of brotherhood renewed.

It is no longer a secret. Nicknamed Lip, he’s involved. Man knows some moneyed types. The mayor and town supervisor won’t say — they have guaranteed use of the old rescue boats stashed at undisclosed locations.

Why let perfectly good East Hampton rescue boats sit unused, then get stuck in yet another local museum? Let the lifeguards, the young at heart, the disabled, the striped bass pole wackadoodles, the aging delusional lifeguards command the boats to the oceanfront, launch them, sink them, retrieve them.

It is a crime to deny the young ’uns a ride in those old wooden boats. Enough with the stupid Jet Skis, plastic-composite goof paddleboards, the BZ so-called soft surfboards. Every man, woman, young ’un, maybe a dog or two should get something wood-planked under their feet on open Atlantic waters. Get out and live for once in your boring lives! The ink’s not dry! Some of the ink could be invisible? No doubt it’s a deal!

A couple of stealth lawyers are involved — people you know! To get on the movie or pilot TV payroll an East Hampton car registration must be presented. For those without car registrations — lots of people lose their licenses round here for driving offenses — two bona fide residents must vouch, “Said person lives here.”

A couple of 1960s surfboards will be needed, pre-2005 Ford trucks, a couple of older Chevy trucks. No Toyotas, GMCs, Mitsubishis, none of those awful trucks allowed in the production area camera line of sight. Traditional sunhats are required, no CVS or Waldbaum’s $10 Panama Jack hats are allowed. Bathing suits the East Hampton lifeguards wear will be de rigueur. Bathing suits that do not meet athletic requirements will be banned from all sets.

The “Baywatch Gone Bonacker” film extravaganza begins. First scene! Village of East Hampton lifeguards rowing past the second jetty at Georgica Beach headed for Main Beach in one of the surviving antique East Hampton rescue boats. A whale surfaces nearby: They’ve seen them before and don’t care. All kinds of bluefish gnarl around 30 yards from rescue boat. It is early fall and the guards are due back at school. It has been one of those fishy summers: Bluefish eating everything in sight was common this summer past.

Other fish surface. The lifeguards, male and female, don’t care. Their tans are dark enough; a couple of the lifeguards are slightly sunburnt, wearing pasty white sunscreen and large hats. An outsider might say, “What are they from ‘Gilligan’s Island’ or something?”

A few of the young adults are thinking back to critical rescues they pulled off under hurricane conditions. The water temperature is warm, 70 degrees. The young lifeguards row along, picking up the southwest drift headed north on the incoming tide toward Main Beach. “Stellar beauty” could best describe it.

The second sandbars are visible under the boat 120 yards offshore. The low tide is turning to incoming. Clear visibility 12 feet down to the offshore sandbar under the rescue boat. It’s a lunar tide. A bonita makes a showing; oddly enough a parrotfish swirls by under the boat. One of the lifeguards says to his female friend, “Saw one of those last week.”

A lot of stuff happened this past summer, from the first jump into the frigid last-day-of-May waters off their hometown of East Hampton until this September day. Thank God no one was seriously injured! Five tropical depressions and one hurricane made swirl off Long Island — Atlantic-bound July and August storms. An 18-year-old lifeguard was called on to make a complicated rescue of a pregnant 29-year-old who got pulled off the beach by a freak tidal surge. He had to make a fast 50-yard sprint-swim and grab onto her; she was panicking, the surf was eight feet, one tumble through the nasty shore break and the ambulance would have been called — a miracle it was.

On the other hand, amusing situations arose on the rainiest days early in June. “Ha-ha, you’ve got to be kidding.” Boys will be boys, and girls will be girls. “O.M.G., did you see what Francine and Thomas did? Ha-ha, oh no.” It was the song: “We’ve been through some things together . . . we’ve found things to do in stormy weather . . . rollin’ down that empty ocean road, gettin’ to the surf on time. Long may you run.” Sing it, Neil!

In addition, lots of heavy stuff happened. One of the lifeguard’s parents took ill and died. One lifeguard’s parents lost steering on his 28-foot sport boat — flipped it — and managed to swim away unscratched. “There’s a light over my head, my Lord, let it shine, let it shine”: Neil Young. Nieces and nephews were born to families. A few lifeguards fell in love: storied days of summer.

A couple of super-strange characters showed up at a Village of East Hampton beach one week in late July. The F.B.I. paid the lifeguards a visit to ask about a couple of things concerning these visitors. Of course this was all hush-hush! The agent said wait two years, and if you want to make a movie about it, go for it.

He told the lifeguards, “Keep it under wraps with a lawyer and a movie guy. In two years our end of it will be totally wrapped up. You kids deserve to make some real money. We’re not going to interfere.” The F.B.I. man continued, “Thanks for the help! You’re all good kids. Try to do well enough in school and keep your day jobs. Ha-ha. Summer lifeguard jobs.”

He smiled, gave spin to his tires a bit, and off he drove in new dark-colored Ford Mustang.

Morgan McGivern is The Star’s staff photographer.

By chance, my son, Ellis, and I became East Hampton 7-on-7 soccer fans last week. With time to kill before meeting the rest of the family for a dinner out that never happened, my 5-year-old suggested going to the playground.

We arrived a little after 7 p.m. There was a little chill in the air. I pulled on an old sweatshirt from the back of the car. Ellis did not want his, and ran in short shirtsleeves toward the climbing equipment and swings.

Ellis’s attention was quickly diverted to the game just ending on the big field just behind the Waldbaum’s supermarket, however. We watched as the winning team, which I found out later was Hampton F.C.-Bill Miller, wrapped it up.

One of the next sides to come onto the field  wore blue uniforms, Ellis’s favorite color, so they instantly were his team. I told him I was taking the guys in black and white stripes.

Not that I know all that much about soccer, but the level of play looked good enough to me. Seven-on-7 is a fast game, and plenty physical.

Ellis, seated on a bench behind my team’s goal, yelled, “Go blue!” every time a team member touched the ball. He was right in his choice, of course, and, as the evening sun turned everything golden, the blues, Bateman Painting, took the win.

On a somewhat astonishing website devoted to the local 7-on-7 six-team league I later found a photograph of Ellis and me watching the Bateman game. I look far too serious, frowning in my wife’s old college sweatshirt. But Ellis is on the edge of his seat, excited and en