If you gotta lose, lose looking good
The Sultans of Dot enter their sixth year with a new look, and that look is good. Spring trends are bright red, a brawny new logo and victory.
We keep our old, black-and-white Sultans jerseys in the place in our hearts where we keep the cartoon Oriole Bird, the original McDonald's fry recipe and letter-writing. I plan to break out the old jersey around the house (regularly) and when I need a shirt with the sleeves cut off by a knife (more sporadically). It's practically Cooperstown Collection.
On the new jerseys, new skipper Cesar even got us numbers on the back. Numbers… we got to choose. For those of us who've played for the Sultans from the start — just a few of us left now — this is big.
The season began Thursday evening on Gannett Field, years after its projected death now the Fenway of media conglomerate softball fields. We took on a team from SAIC, our defense contracting neighbor, and they pushed us around like we were a Tysons Corner excavation crew. They beat us 13-1 as darkness fell. We weren't that bad, but we lost.
But we were playing. We were playing on our field. We were playing on our field in our new fire-red jerseys with the numbers on the back. Hope had sprung external once again, sprinting down the line to first.
