A Little League game in Indiana. Two teams, ten-year-olds, a Saturday morning in June. The visiting team is called the Cardinals. Their catcher is named Owen. He has been the catcher for three seasons. He has, this spring, stopped growing, and he has, this spring, been given a diagnosis, and his parents have been told they should let him play as long as he can stand. The home team is called the Falcons. They were told about Owen on Wednesday. The Falcons are ten. They spent Wednesday night, together, at their coach's house, arguing about what to do. Owen does not know any of this. He arrives Saturday in his catcher's gear. He walks slower than he did last spring. His mother sits in the aluminum bleachers with a small cooler that has, in it, three kinds of pills. The Falcons take the field. The first Cardinals batter comes up. He hits a ground ball to shortstop. The shortstop, a Falcons boy of ten who has practiced this play a thousand times, fields it cleanly, and then throws it, very deliberately, ten feet over the first baseman's head. The runner is safe. The next Cardinals batter comes up. He hits a fly ball to left field. The left fielder, who is the best left fielder in the county at his age, catches it, and then, very deliberately, drops it. The runner is safe. The Cardinals coach begins to understand something. The Cardinals parents begin to understand something. Owen does not, yet. He comes to the plate in the second inning. The Falcons pitcher, whose fastball can genuinely hurt at this age, throws him a slow, straight pitch down the middle of the plate. Owen swings. Owen makes contact for the first time in three weeks. The ball rolls, weakly, toward the second baseman. The second baseman looks at the ball. He looks at Owen, running. He picks the ball up. He puts it in his back pocket. Owen reaches first, then second, then third. Nobody is chasing him. The Falcons players are jogging beside him in a loose cluster, cheering, in the way children cheer when adults are watching them cheer for the right reason. Owen crosses home plate. His mother, in the bleachers, has not moved for four minutes. The Falcons catcher, a boy of ten who has never met Owen, hands Owen the ball he hit and says, quietly, "Home run." The final score is not recorded. Nobody writes it down. Nobody keeps the box score. Ten-year-old boys, in Indiana, on a Saturday morning in June, have collectively agreed that some games do not need a winner. Owen played every inning. He played the whole game. He went home with the ball in his glove and the ball in his back pocket and no fever until Sunday. He died in August. The Falcons went to the funeral. They wore their uniforms. The coach had asked them to. They stood in a line, ten of them, in green and white polyester, and they gave his mother the ball from second base, which the second baseman had kept in a drawer since June, and which he had, for reasons he could not explain, been unable to give up until then. She keeps it now. Ten strangers, on a Saturday, decided a boy would round the bases. Some innings are longer than others.