NORWAY - A baseball cap parked on his head, the elderly gentleman guarding the entrance to the diamond asked for a few dollars.

In return, he gave me some gratitude.

I think I got the better deal.

"Thank you for supporting baseball," he said to my wife and I.

Thank you? No thanks were necessary. After all, we were in one of Iowa's legendary baseball strongholds. Hollywood made "The Final Season," about Norway High School's last team.

We brought no camera, but we saw the lights and the action. My son's team was playing in the Iowa Amateur Baseball Association state tournament. Walford lost that first-round game to a squad from Muscatine. In a way, it didn't matter, because I saw my own history run right through the scene here.

Beyond the outfield fence, the trains raced up and down the tracks, seemingly every 15 minutes. When I was in grade school, my dad worked as a depot agent for a railroad company in Minnesota. Every day, I heard the whistles and watched the locomotives fly past the window, with iron ore heaped into the cars.

Across a street from Norway's baseball field, tall corn stood at attention. Sorry, no ghost players came out. But the kids, in search of foul balls, dived in. I never played next to a cornfield, I spent my share of time thrashing through weeds (and, I must confess, beautiful gardens) in search of missing baseballs.

And, of course, there were the fans of all shapes and sizes. The older guys fascinated me, because I'd seen men just like them at games for year after year.

One of them offered guidance to the boys wading into the corn. Left! he'd yell. No! Right!.

At one point, our fan turned to a friend. In a voice that made a train whistle seem like a whisper, he said. "Geez, some of these kids don't know left from right! Or north from south!"

Maybe, maybe not. But I liked the direction the night followed, offering a path from the past to the present that shows how sports can enrich our lives, if we let it.

This is no plea for the good old days. I feel no urge to dress the game in the flannel players wore decades ago. Times change. People change. Games change.

A major league game now gives us rock and roll (very loud rock and roll) as well as balls and strikes. Fans wonder about drug tests and steroids. And place your bets on the sausage race. Still, a trip to Wrigley Field or Fenway Park, if you can afford it, gives us the game at its best.

On a Friday night in Norway, the sausages filled a more traditional role - as food for the hungry baseball fans. We heard a little music, but the classic "Who's On First?" comedy routine made famous by Abbott and Costello, also floated over the field.

Town baseball isn't as popular as it used to be. Waterloo's team hasn't been around for a while. Yet, to visit a place like Norway is to revisit the game and its roots. It's also a chance to see a life as it races from boy to man.

All that for a few dollars.

And the guy was thanking me?