It comes all at once: blinding lights, an intense heat, the shoves of people pushing by, so many loud and abrasive noises, not to mention the olfactory assault. Coming home is hard.
The game is a popcorn-sounding money-grab that is a scourge on the sporting world that should have separate courts made for them specifically, rather than converting tennis courts.
My father was an outdoorsman, and some of my earliest memories are of sitting with him on the ridgelines of Pennsylvania, watching the wind ripple across the valleys below and turn the segmented farmland into a vast patchwork quilt of gold and rust.