When I was a boy, my size—husky, as department store sales clerks tactfully put it—all but ensured that football was in my future. “That boy needs to be playing football,” people would tell my parents.

And yet, once I began playing organized football, my very size seemed to make me invisible. “What position you play?” these same people would ask, dubiously.

“Offensive tackle,” I’d say.

“Oh,” they would reply. Inevitably, a long, awkward pause would follow.

The response was understandable. Offensive line is the least visible, least glamorous spot on the football team—the domain, it is usually assumed, of slow-footed, slow-witted, hulking gorks.

How much talent, people figure, does it really take to be a sledge?

On behalf of all us unskilled, galumphing blockers, I am pleased to dub this season “The Revenge of the Fat Boys.” This year, in particular, we have abundant evidence for what fans and media geniuses always seem to forget: No team goes anywhere without its plow horses.

Take Vanderbilt: The Commodores entered the season with an experienced defense, improved passing, and a strong kicking game.

But their hopes have cratered because of an inexperienced, overwhelmed offensive line. More and more, Vandy’s front appears incapable of resisting even a sorority rush. With no time to pass and nowhere to run, Vandy simply abandons the field to its defense, which must feel like the little Dutch boy trying to hold back the sea.

Things aren’t nearly so dire in Vol Land, but it’s a difference of degree, not kind. Tennessee, too, dearly misses the powerful O-line it fielded just a year ago.

But the best vindication for the beef-eating behemoths is that the best player in college football this year, without question, is an offensive left tackle. If there is a smidge of justice in the land, Ohio State’s Orlando Pace will win the Heisman—the heretofore exclusive preserve of runners and passers—and not just one of those consolation awards they set aside for linemen.

Last season, Ohio State had the best “skill” people in America: the Heisman-winning runner, the best tight end, a great wideout, and a fine QB. They still lost two games.

This year, those skill players are gone, but the unbeaten Buckeyes haven’t missed them, thanks to Orlando and his large friends. (Object lesson: even average backs look good when no one touches them until they’re five yards downfield.)

Pace’s successes are measured in pancakes—plays in which his opponent is laid flat on his back. Orlando both produces and consumes pancakes in abundance. The most apt image of him was published recently in Sports Illustrated, where Pace was pictured clearing out not one, not two, but three Notre Dame defenders.

That shot also served as a message: Get back, all you lovers of the poofy Run-and-Shoot and the swishy West Coast Offense. We are lineman. Hear us roar.

A perfect game

A couple of months ago in this space, I vowed that if the Texas Rangers, the long-suffering baseball team of my youth, managed to win their division after 24 seasons of futility, I would take my father to see them play.

They managed, and we went—for the last game of the regular season, on the last Sunday afternoon in September. Less than 48 hours earlier, the Rangers had clinched the pennant for which we’d been waiting all those years.

Unlike the playoffs, nothing rode on the outcome of this game against the hapless California Angels. Officially, it was meaningless. But to me, it was perfect—a perfectly meaningless game on a perfect, unseasonably temperate afternoon.

The purists say that baseball is spiritual, a sacred trust to be passed down and preserved. They can’t entirely explain it, and, to those with no love for the game, it seems unfathomably ludicrous. But I know its holiness is real.

I felt it almost as soon as we entered The Ballpark at Arlington—the spectacular new venue that replaced the reconstituted old minor-league stadium I remembered. Even amid Arlington’s amusement-park clutter, The Ballpark dominates the landscape with its old-fashioned palisade of soaring brick arches and towers.

The entire place, of course, is an utter contrivance, a fairy palace rising from the prairie. More than anything, it’s a monument to baseball’s tradition, full of architectural grafts from other legendary parks.

The right-field porch and the decorative iron façades that ring the top are borrowed from Yankee Stadium. The green knoll beyond center field is an homage to Kansas City. As in the old ballparks, the field is asymmetrical and intimate, with odd nooks and crannies. As at Wrigley and Fenway, a manually operated scoreboard records the progress of every major-league game. Winding around the concourse underneath, your eyes gravitate to the canopy of huge, riveted steel beams that support the whole faux-antique structure.

Yet the calculated effect worked, at least for me. At times, I felt supernaturally transported to another era, as if I were watching a game at Ebbets Field or at the Polo Grounds or at Philadelphia’s shambling old Shibe Park.

When their lead-off batter homered, I knew the Rangers were preordained to win, just for us. As the game progressed, we talked about some of the forlorn Ranger teams of the past—and some of their great players we had seen. My father recalled another final day of the season, 45 years ago, when he was listening to the radio: Bobby Thompson hit a home run with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, and the announcer shouted hysterically, “The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!”

Texas fell behind, but in the sixth Kevin Elster, cast off by nearly everyone a year ago, hit a two-run homer to give the Rangers a 4-3 lead they kept. After the final California batter struck out, the crowd stood for a long time and cheered. The Rangers’ players stood on the field a long time too, shaking hands and savoring the moment, and, when they left, many flung their red caps to the fans. I began to wonder whether there might be something true after all in that sappiest yet most compelling of all baseball movies, Field of Dreams: Maybe it is possible, for a little while, that a ballpark can intersect with heaven.

By now, of course, the Rangers are gone from the playoffs. But, in baseball, a fresh chance is never farther away than one at-bat or one more game or a new spring. For loyal fans, baseball really has little to do with winning. It has everything to do with yearning.

After we finally left our seats, my dad and I took one more stroll around the park’s concourse. As the late-afternoon shadows lengthened across the outfield, a fan was walking hand in hand with his little daughter around the bases. We watched them wordlessly for several seconds, and then we turned to go.

How it looks from the La-Z-Boy

Vanderbilt 27, North Texas 13

Tennessee 34, Georgia 16

Alabama 24, North Carolina State 7

Auburn 30, Mississippi State 12

Florida 34, LSU 14

South Carolina 23, Kentucky 10

Arkansas 21, Louisiana Tech 13

Florida State 17, Miami 10

Washington 27, Notre Dame 24