A few weeks back my daughter Dylan and her good friend Laila hatched a plan to bring their dads to a baseball game to have them bond. I could tell that they were both slightly concerned that the experience might prove to be too much for us; at multiple points leading up to the big day, both of them asked “are you worried this is going to be awkward? Do you think you’ll get along OK? What if you don’t have anything to talk about?”

Little did they realize that middle-aged dads pretty much already know how to have a good time at a ballgame.

Monty (my daughter-appointed brand new friend lol) grew up in New York as a big Mets’ fan, thus our choice of games: Mets at Giants on a reasonably warm Monday evening in San Francisco. The hometown team had little trouble with the visitors on this day; they jumped out to an early lead and were never particularly threatened in a 5-2 victory. We did get to see home runs from current Met Pete Alonso and former Met Michael Conforto. Not much from former A’s Sterling Marte or Matt Chapman, though.

But most of today was a chance to enjoy an evening at the ballpark with our amazing kids, and share our own baseball coming-of-age tales.

“It’s actually a pretty pathetic story,” he told me, as we chatted about his Mets’ fandom during the early innings of the game. “I was in upstate New York in 1979, I must have been eight years old. The Yankees were actually the really dominant team back in the late 70s. But the Mets were on WOR, our local station. They had lost I think 99 games that first year, but I was eight years old. And I think that’s that’s an age when you get totally hooked. And so that was it.”

Those first teams were…not good. In retrospect, the Mets ascendancy was stunningly abrupt: from 1977-1983, the team never won more than 68 games. Then in ’84 they won 90 games. In ’85 they won 98 but finished three games back of the Cardinals in the NL East. And then, of course, came 1986, when the team won 108 games and the World Series. Doc Gooden and Daryl Strawberry and Mookie Wilson and Ron Darling and Sidd Finch (just kidding!) were household names in those glory days, but the Mets’ best players in the early 80s? Well…Lee Mazzilli. Richie Hebner, maybe? And I guess some other guys. You know you’re a fan if you’re a fan of a team that’s THAT bad.

But by the time the team started rolling, in the way that I remember as a kid too, Monty was living in…Kentucky. He’d moved there with his family.

“So I have nobody who’s gonna watch them that year,” he said. “But I was. More quietly, but I’m definitely following very closely. Strawberry came in as a rookie in ’83 Gooden in ’84. They traded for Hernandez in ’84, Gary Carter joined the team, and all of a sudden they became a juggernaut. And back then they didn’t really have cable so you didn’t even get to watch.”

I remember that year vividly too, and I was living in suburban Detroit at the time. I was a spectacularly uncool baseball-obsessed 12-year-old kid who recognized that maybe he could have more than one favorite team, especially if he didn’t tell anyone. In the mid-80s, my Aunt Jane was working as an ad executive on the east coast and did a commercial with Dwight Gooden; he gifted her a Mets’ jersey and she passed it along to me and I was hooked as well. I still have that jersey, though it’s now ridiculously small, to the point where not even my daughter was interested in wearing it to the game.

I spent most of the summer of 1986 in the basement of my parents’ house, in my ‘baseball card room.’ The space was originally intended to be a downstairs bathroom but at the time it was just a hollow shell of a room with exposed 2×4 studs and one dangling 60-watt lightbulb; it eventually was finished, but not until the mid 90s when I had moved on to college. That summer I meticulously cut every Mets’ boxscore and game story from the afternoon Detroit News and used a bottle of Elmer’s Glue to fit them into an old photo album. I think that album might still exist somewhere, I’m not sure.

Monty, meanwhile, spent a fair portion of his youth at Shea Stadium. The ballpark held very little charm for him but that didn’t matter. He pointed out, a little jealously, that I got to spend much of my own youth at Tiger Stadium. I never saw Shea in person but I always adored Tiger Stadium. Both were essentially dumps, but one was a dump with charm.

Still, for Monty, Shea was home. And in a metaphorical way, still is.

“You know, I’ve been gone from New York now for 40 years,” he said. “And I lived in Chicago. I’ve been in San Francisco for 20 years. But you still have your childhood team, right? I still follow the Mets. I watch on the app, I probably watched about 30 games a year, which is a lot for a guy who’s got kids and a job.”

He laughs.

He’s right, though; you don’t ever forget about anything you were rooting for when you were a kid.

Fast-forward a few decades and the two of us are a couple of 50-something-year-olds (technically I’m still in my 40s for another couple of months!) taking the train into San Francisco with our chatty, adorable, T-Swift-loving teenage daughters to watch the Mets lose to the Giants. It’s possible this year’s version of the team might not be all that amazing.

But ‘amazing’ is a word I’d use for our lives anyway.

You can access the audio version of my conversation with Monty by going here. Thanks for listening! And reading!