In December, espnWs weekly essay series will focus on family.In college, when I began dating the man who would become my husband, he told me that his family loved baseball.Okay, I said, treating the news as if hed said they all liked the color blue -- a fine distinguishing characteristic, but nothing that had anything to do with me.No, you dont understand. My brother plays baseball in college, he insisted. I spent my whole life going to baseball games and tournaments.I nodded.Growing up, my father was the only one who liked sports, hed rush us home from church on Sunday so he didnt miss his religious programming. A Dallas Cowboys game.?The importance of my sports knowledge didnt sink in until my then-boyfriends father, Gary, started greeting me at the dr on my visits to their house with a baseball trivia question.You cant come in until you tell me what number Kirby Puckett was.Ill answer your question when you can name five Faulkner novels, Id say and duck under his arm.To understand us, you have to understand baseball, Dave once told me over a dinner of burgers at our favorite diner. I shrugged.Whats to understand?The second year we were dating, I started my senior year of college. One of the classes I signed up for was on Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. I loved Faulkner, whose wild characters and dense prose often made me laugh out loud. But I cared nothing for Hemingway. I hated his female characters and the cold feel of his short sentences. But I couldnt take a class on one without the other, so I signed up.We began that semester with Hemingways short stories, starting with the collection The Snows of Kilimanjaro and then moving onto?In Our Time. I was surprised at how often sports were on the periphery of his writing -- the depressed prize fighter in The Killers, the match fixing in Fifty Grand and hunting in The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.It was something Id never noticed before, how consumed with physical action his characters were, how sport gave them an identity, whether real or imagined, that could in turn devastate and define who they were.I told Gary I was reading Hemingway.Oh, hes my favorite author, he said on one of my visits. I was shocked. I didnt think he read anything besides bks on management and Mickey Mantle biographies. He told me his favorite bk was Old Man and the Sea, and I rolled my eyes.Hey, I guess Im not an English major, he said, so I cant tell you why I like it, just that I think it means something to me. He smiled, but I could tell he meant it. When I picked up In Our Time, I decided just to read it like Gary would, without prejudice.The Three-Day Blow is everything I hate in a story -- boys going into the wds to talk about women and get drunk. But when I read it that fall, I was 21 and in love with a boy who loved baseball. Reading the story again, I saw baseball in a way Id never seen it before. Upset over a breakup, Nick Adams, a character who became an alter-ego for Hemingway, goes to a cabin with his friend Bill. They get drunk on whiskey and talk about women, but that topic contains mystery and heartbreak. So, they talk baseball. Alternating between love and disillusionment for the sport, their words become metaphors for the other things they cant bring themselves to say. When Nick declares ...baseball is a game for louts he might as well be saying love is a game for louts.Baseball is more than a metaphor in this story. It is a thing wholly and completely on its own, a series of events, small stories, with characters and plot, which give the two boys a common language and experience.When all else failed, baseball was a way to be part of something together -- some way to touch and connect with something great, to believe that whatever else fails, here is a thing that mattered, a place where winning was possible, and hope always prevailed. After all, win or lose, the only guarantee is that there will be more games and another season, another chance.That same semester, during Thanksgiving break, as I began to write my final paper for the class on baseball, Hemingway and love, Dave asked me to marry him under the stars while we danced as Carole Kings Far Away played from the CD player on his Mazda. We went back to his parents house and told them.After hugging me, Gary and my sn-to-be brother-in-law tk me to the basement to watch the Twins 1991 World Series video. I laughed, but I watched the whole thing, listening to their analysis and finally memorizing Kirby Pucketts number, 34.Lyz Lenzs writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Marie Claire, Pacific Standard, Buzzfeed and the LA Review of Bks. She lives in Iowa, but you can find her on Twitter @lyzl Wholesale NBA Jerseys . 4 Villanova with a 96-68 drubbing on Monday. Wragge hit 9-of-14 from behind the arc, matching Kyle Korvers schl record for 3-pointers in a game set in 2003, as Creighton (16-3, 6-1 Big East broke a conference record with 21 treys in the rout. Cheap NBA Jerseys Authentic . The All-Pro lineman got the leg bent under him while trying to make a tackle during the first half of a 22-20 overtime loss at Miami on Thursday night. The medical staff initially thought hed torn the ligament, and the test a day later in Cincinnati confirmed it. https://www.nbachinajerseys.us/ . The giant slalom world champion slipped during her first run in the morning, landing on her back and then twisting forward before getting her leg caught in the protective material on the side of the slope. Fake NBA Jerseys . Detroit and Boston are deadlocked, 1-1, and Tigers manager Jim Leyland could be forgiven if he was caught rationalizing instead of dissecting how his club could blow a 5-1 lead late in Game 2. Nike NBA Jerseys China . The Islanders dealt Thomas Vanek to the Montreal Canadiens after less than a year on Long Island. Meanwhile, the Oilers dealt long-time sniper Ales hemsky to the Ottawa Senators on Wednesday for a fifth-round pick in 2014 and a third-rounder in 2015. MINNEAPOLIS -- Lindsay Whalen scored a season-high 22 points and Minnesota used a mind-boggling run to rout the Dallas Wings 93-56 on Saturday night.Sylvia Fowles added 14 points and 10 rebounds to help the Lynx (16-4) bounce back from a 93-89 overtime loss at the Connecticut Sun on Thursday night.Minnesota, No. 2 in the WNBA AP power poll, trailed 9-5 before scoring 40 of the next 44 points starting in the middle of the first quarter and carrying into the middle of the second. The Lynx had their largest lead aat 88-42 with 4:45 left in the game.ddddddddddddWhalen hit 11 of her 13 shots and had seven rebounds and five assists. Maya Mre, Jia Perkins and Natasha Howard scored 12 points apiece.The Lynx had a 51-25 edge in rebounding and made 52 percent from the field while holding the seventh-ranked Wings (9-12) to 24.6 percent.Aerial Powers and Erin Phillips led Dallas with nine points each. ' ' '