Free at last

A couple of minutes after the Astros hauled in the final fly ball last night to win their first-ever trip to the World Series, my phone rang. I didn't have to check caller ID to know who was calling: It was my brother, checking in from Texas, about the team we began following in 1965, when I was 14 and he was 13.

"It's been 40 years," he said. "Forty years. And now I have seen the Promised Land."

The Astros haunted us for decades. We began listening on the radio when the Astrodome opened, getting hooked while spending spring nights on cots on the screen porch as the Astros played a series of exhibition games against the New York Yankees, then still starring Mickey Mantle.

It wasn't just the baseball. We grew up out in the country in South Texas, and the Astros opened a window on a world that we could only imagine: We followed an ongoing storyline -- mostly futile, sometimes absurd -- night after night, city after city, to St. Louis, San Francisco, New York, Chicago. On West Coast swings, when games started about the time we had to go to bed, we would fall asleep with the radio turned down low in the dark. I remember lying half asleep one night in extra innings as Willie Mays, then still in his prime, fouled off pitch after pitch, waiting for just the right one before driving the ball out of the park to end the game.

Finally seeing the team live was an experience I recall more clearly than any game I have ever seen since. That game was against the Cardinals, too, and the Astros won it, 4-3, when Bob Aspromonte hit a line drive single that split the third-base line with the bases loaded in the bottom of the 10th.

When the Astros finally were on the verge of making the playoffs for the first time, in 1980, they went into LA with a two-game lead on the Dodgers and three to play. The Astros lost the first two, and my phone rang after the final out of the second game. It wasn't my brother but a sportswriting buddy, whose first words were, "This is the suicide hotline. We had a message to call here." But the Astros won that third game (the headline in the Los Angeles Times: "Astros win first prize, two days in Philadelphia; Dodgers win second, winter in LA") and played the best post-season series ever against the Phillies, but the World Series remained elusive.

I tried to swear off the Astros over the years. It was always a lousy match, the Astros with their fake grass and Hawaiian luau jerseys and exploding scoreboard and me railing against aluminum bats and calling for a constitutional amendment to outlaw the designated hitter rule. I tried to adopt the Rangers and the Rockies, but nothing took. For me, it was the Astros or nobody.

And now they're in the World Series. I have seen the Promised Land.