In America I got lost and pulled over next to a field where small children were playing baseball very, very badly. I intended to check my map. I stayed two hours. I could not leave. I need you to understand that I tried. The children were perhaps eight years old. They played the way water plays: with great effort and no direction. A boy in the outfield was watching an airplane. The ball rolled past him. He continued to watch the airplane. Somewhere, that airplane was having the best day of its life, and it did not know a child had chosen it over the game. Nobody was angry. This was the first thing I did not understand. In my land, effort without result is a wound. Here, a child missed the ball completely, spun around from the force of missing, fell down, and every adult present cheered as if he had done something. He had done nothing. They cheered the nothing. They cheered so hard for the nothing that the boy stood up believing he had done something, and ran to a base that no one had hit the ball toward, and they cheered that too. A man beside me was keeping score in a small notebook. I looked at the notebook to understand who was winning. The notebook did not say who was winning. The notebook said things like "Tyler swung!!" with two exclamation points, and "Katie almost caught it," and one entry, circled, that simply read "GOOD HUSTLE." I asked him the score. He said, "Oh, I don't know. I stopped counting in the first inning." He had been writing for an hour. He had not been recording the game. He had been recording the children. He was making, without knowing it, the only history this town would keep of a Tuesday. Then a very small boy came up to bat. Smaller than the bat. The bat and the boy were, physically, a negotiation. The pitcher, also small, threw the ball with everything he had, which was not much, which was correct. The boy swung. He missed. He swung again. He missed. On the third miss the entire field, both teams, the parents, the man with the notebook, went completely silent, and I felt my own chest do something I did not authorize. The next pitch, the boy hit it. Barely. The ball traveled the distance of a polite cough. You have never heard a sound like the sound that town made. The boy ran to first base holding his helmet on with one hand. He was safe by the enormous margin of everyone deciding he was safe. The other team's coach was clapping. The other team's coach. Clapping for the run that beat his own team, if anyone had been counting, which the notebook confirms no one was. The boy stood on first base, breathing hard, looking for someone in the crowd. He found her. A woman. She gave him a thumbs up so small and so total that I had to look at my map for a while. I did not read the map. I could not have told you a single road on it. I stayed until the last child had batted, which is a rule I now understand they have: the game does not end by score, the game ends when every child has had their turn to be cheered for a thing they did not quite do. Then they all got orange slices. Even the outfielder. Especially the outfielder. He had, after all, seen a really good airplane. I drove away eventually. I was, I will admit, not entirely sure where I was going. But I knew who won. Everyone. The notebook was right not to count. Some games are only losable by keeping score, and that town, on that field, had quietly decided not to.