Frank's Place: Basketball unites family and friends

We sports fans hit a certain age, and suddenly it's the loss column that occupies our attention.

Once a distant peal, the constant toll of death and change rings louder every day. A consequential career ends. A boyhood hero dies. A beloved institution is diminished. A sports tradition is obscured by innovation.

Week to week, the terrain of the familiar shifts.

On Wednesday, with a victory at Cheyney, a niece played what was likely her final competitive basketball game.

Throughout the last 15 winters, Katie Fitzpatrick's talents provided entertainment as well as an excuse for the family to gather. As the games and her contributions to them grew more significant - from youth league to elementary school to high school to college - the gatherings grew as well. At her final home game, senior day at Mansfield, there were nearly 30 in her personal cheering section.

Waiting for her after the career-concluding victory, in the crowded lobby at Cheyney's arena, many of us came together again, drawn there to say farewell as much to a shared experience as to Katie.

A former teammate had traveled there on this stormy night with her tiny son. When the boy became restless and the weather worsened, she told Katie's father she couldn't wait but to convey her best wishes. "Tell her I love her," she said before walking out into the rain.

Katie's boyfriend drove three hours to attend. Various aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends assembled and, like funeral-goers, whispered their remembrances of games past.

Off to the side, my brother - her father - wore an odd look on his face, one that summed up all that had been gained through this sporting bond he'd developed with his daughter and all that now seemed lost.

"I'm really going to miss this," he said. "We've had this basketball connection since she was 6. It's tough."

Another connection, not nearly so powerful or close as father and daughter, was broken two days earlier.

Mike Daly, who played on Cardinal O'Hara's 1968 Catholic League champions and on Villanova's NCAA runner-up team in 1971, died suddenly Monday. A high school friend, an adult neighbor, a constant email correspondent and occasional lunch partner, he was a generous and lighthearted presence throughout life.

Last year, as we walked to our cars following dinner at a mutual friend's, he offered me his two Masters tickets.

"My son and I have been there often enough," he said. "Go with your son."

In a grim irony, one of our last email exchanges came a few weeks ago, after we'd both seen an Inquirer obituary for a "Hot Dog" Daly. I joked that, having recalled his style of play, I briefly thought it might have been him but was relieved to learn it was not.

"You and me both!" he replied "Although I did have two dental implants put in yesterday, which had me considering some extreme alternatives."

Except for his family, Mike loved nothing more than Villanova basketball. He rarely missed a home game, a charity golf tournament, a fund-raiser or athletic banquet.

He knew every Wildcats basketball alumnus and made it his mission to bring them together. If there was a funeral for one at Villanova's chapel, he was there and probably had helped arrange it.

Saturday, Wildcats young and old gathered again on the steps beneath that church's handsome twin spires, this time to say goodbye to Mike.

"Mike Daly," said Wildcats coach Jay Wright, "was one of the most loyal and passionate Villanova basketball fans of all time."

Whenever Villanova played in the postseason, he would call '71 teammates Chris Ford, Tom Inglesby, and Ed Hastings. "Road trip," was all he needed to say. This year, a diminished and despondent threesome will make the journey.

The basketball world must have had advance knowledge of his passing. On the day Mike Daly died, Villanova was the nation's No. 1 team.

Sometime during this week of valedictions, I read about baseball eliminating the rolling block slide.

If there's one sport baby boomers cling to, it's baseball. More than any other game, it has managed to connect the generations, to keep its history alive, to remain familiar.

In reality, while we codgers would like to believe otherwise, baseball has never been static. Pitchers, after all, no longer throw underhanded. And there are designated hitters, replays, and black maple bats.

For most of our lives, we were able to accept the new and different. But, as we ossified in sentimentality, we often hit the tipping point.

Apparently baseball, which for years had muddied its product by the addition of commercial gimmicks, needless technological innovations, and countless delays, now is in the business of damaging the game through subtraction.

No takeout slides? No home plate collisions? Very few of those spittle-spewing, dust-raising, wildly entertaining arguments between managers and umpires?

That's not tinkering with the game's edges. That's reaching into its heart.

On yet another day in the busy week, I visited the Maryland grave of F. Scott Fitzgerald, where some whimsical soul had left a tiny bottle of gin. Perhaps amid the week's bittersweet business, I felt compelled to travel there because, like The Great Gatsby phrase inscribed on the great author's tombstone, events kept carrying me back "ceaselessly into the past."

I always advise young people to ignore my sentimental excesses about sports, though most times they do so without any counsel, and to create and cherish their own memories.

"Life," Fitzgerald also wrote, "hasn't much to offer except youth."

The day will come, soon enough, when the young will find losses of their own to lament.

Old men always do.

ffitzpatrick@phillynews.com

@philafitz