YES Network.com

"Yeah," I said. It was my turn to sit in the passenger seat, stay on the lookout for crazy drivers, and mollify our cats and dog for a whole bunch of hours and road miles.

"You're sure you remembered them?" The Wife said. "Because it won't be much fun being around you if it turns out you forgot the tickets."

"I've got the tickets," I grunted, having already done my mental inventory. Dog, cats, notebook computer, Yanks tickets. All else was superfluous.

She looked at me. It was the Sunday, the first day of April, and we were heading into New York from Port Getaway for Monday's Opening Day game at the Stadium.

"What's with you?" she said.

"Nothing."

"You don't seem excited."

"I'm plenty excited," I said. "About Wednesday's game. The 'Welcome Back Andy' game. For me, that's the real Opening Day."

The Wife gave me another long look, started the engine, and then backed out of the driveway.

"You know, I'm as big an Andy Pettitte fan as you are, but I think you're being stupid," she said after awhile. We were now headed south on the highway, our sleepy cat snoring, the other carrying on, the dog quietly hogging the cargo section.

I considered that. The Wife was, indeed, the biggest of Andy fans. Although she mostly didn't like team merchandise, even shunning baseball caps with the interlocking NY logo, she'd often worn a homemade "WHERE'S ANDY?" T-shirt to Yankees games for the past three baseball seasons.

For The Wife, who's a big one for nuance and subtlety, wearing the shirt was a very demonstrative form of expression. I was different. My displeasure with the Yanks' failure to re-up Andy after the '03 season had manifested -- at least early on -- as a slightly insane plot to bring Pettitte back to the Bronx through a manipulation of Chaos Theory.

Chaos Theory. At its most basic, the idea that every seemingly random event is interconnected. A dizzy fly in the Brazilian rainforest conks its head on a tree. As it falls, a bird dives for it and startles an arboreal monkey on a branch. The monkey slips, grabs the branch to keep from falling, and some broken twigs fall into a narrow stream. The twigs form a tiny blockage in the stream that catches other floating debris and slightly diverts the flow of current. Before you know it, one branch of the stream dries up while the other finds a new route to the river. And so on and so forth, till eventually there's drought and famine in one part of the planet and massive flooding in another. That little fly clunking its noggin has started a web of causality that's thrown our entire global ecosystem into flux.

Anyway, that first year Andy was gone, I'd decided to be the dizzy fly of Yank fans and started periodically writing emails to Astros beat writers in the Houston area. Whenever I had a free moment, I'd zip off a quickie that would read something like:

"I've loved the 'Stros since they were known as the Colt 45s back in the sixties and my dear departed Grampa Joe took me to my first baseball game. Therefore, I am a real baseball expert and can tell you we need to get rid of this Pettitte guy and his bum elbow. Ship him back to those stupid Yankees and let them pay his inflated salary. He's a big waste to us -- Yours, Truly, 'Stros Fan #1"

You'd have thought those Houston writers would've blown me off as a crank. But many times they'd answer me. Generally, they'd ask that I remain patient with Pettitte. Take a wait-and-see approach. He might pan out.

Meanwhile, I was hoping to get some of that Chaos Theory stuff going. A whisper here, a whisper there, I thought. You never know where it'll lead. Maybe some dupe reporter in the Astros clubhouse tells another reporter about how his fan mail indicates there's anti-Pettitte sentiment going around. Then maybe the second dupe agrees because he's also gotten a letter from me, and decides to print it in his weekly mailbag column. Before long the Houston fans are buzzing, as is the press box at Minute Maid Park. Everybody in Texas thinks Pettitte's a total bust. Finally, the anti-Andy upswell reaches the ears of Astros owner Drayton MacLane Jr. and he orders a trade. Toot sweet, Brian Cashman's cell phone rings. It's the Astros' GM: "Hey, Cash, you wanna to swap Pettitte for Jaret Wright?"

Okay, so things didn't turn out that way. I had to wait three years for Andy to come back to his baseball home. But it never hurts to be the Chaos Fly. Start a whirlwind, then reap it, I say.

But it seems I've digressed. Hmm. Where were we in my little tale?

Oh, right. The SUV. Heading into New York, looking past Monday's game to the Pettitte homecoming. The Wife giving me looks from the driver's seat. And calling me ... what?

"Stupid?" I said, insulted. "Why am I being stupid?"

"Because Opening Day is Opening Day, and Andy's first game back is Andy's first game back," The Wife said. "You need to enjoy these moments instead of taking some for granted and looking past them. That's the whole point of going to the games. It's the whole point of everything. Otherwise, you miss out on all the fun."

I frowned, folded my arms across my chest, and was quiet.

What irks me about The Wife -- I mean, really gets me -- is that she always makes too much sense.

Opening Day was one of the most enjoyable I've been to in a long while. Besides the pomp of the big American flag and West Point color guard (of which I never get enough) there was that first pitch by Cory Lidle's wife and son, and then seeing Bobby Murcer live from the YES booth on the jumbotron, or whatever the heck that big screen's called nowadays. I must've gotten dust in my eyes, because at times they were a little watery.

I wasn't even worried about the game when the Yanks trailed the increasingly-less-lowly D-Rays by a score of 5-3 in the fifth. I'd planned ahead for the contingency. The revamped Carl Pavano, I'd figured, would do a decent job. But Scott Kazmir would do a better one. The Yanks would fall behind, but eventually Kazmir's pitch count would get up there. He'd be pulled from the game, and the still-lowly Tampa Bay bullpen would blow the game. Yankees win, bring on Sinatra.

Things unfolded pretty much as projected, except I was surprised Joe Maddon, the Rays' manager, left his young ace on the mound to throw a hundred pitches and change. Last season after the All-Star break, Kazmir had to be shut down due to shoulder problems, and this was his first start since. Kazmir is barely 22 years old, and slight of build for a powerballer. The weather, as we all know, wasn't good. He needed to be protected by his manager. Leaving him in the game for over a hundred pitches just to try and grab a win at Yankee Stadium, even a big Opening Day win, was, in my mind, disgraceful. You do not -- or should not -- risk a kid's entire career for any single win.

Still, Kazmir wasn't ultimately my problem. My problem remained finding some way to influence the universe into allowing the Yanks their 27th World Series title. And an Opening Day '07 win was a creditable first step toward that goal.

Thus, the day was a complete success. I made The Wife and myself happy, and enjoyed the moment. And right when the Yanks tied the game at the bottom of the sixth -- I mean right on the button -- the sun even celebrated the moment with me, breaking through the wintry overcast to remind the people shivering in the stands that it was actually April out there. This is the unembellished truth, though you won't read it in any of the newspaper accounts.

The reason being that it's never anything besides gloomy in the press box.

On the other hand, it was not a particularly enjoyable moment when I looked out the window late Wednesday morning.

"It's raining," I said, turning to The Wife. My face was sad. "Those weather people never get their lousy stinking forecasts right, but of course they do it today. And now Andy Pettitte Homecoming Day's going to be a washout."

The Wife was looking at me again. You know the kind of look that I mean. Uh-oh.

"You told me last night that you wouldn't complain if it rained," she said.

Which I had done.

"You admitted you had a great Opening Day game," she said.

Which I had also done.

"So maybe you ought to calm down," she said.

Which I now promised her I would do, but didn't really.

Instead, I went over to my desk and turned on my notebook computer.

"You going to do some work on your book?" The Wife asked, aware I was on deadline.

"Yeah, I'm working on the book," I lied, and went online to check out the Yankees.com website.

Game postponed due to rain, no makeup date scheduled, I read. Probable starting pitcher for Thursday, Andy Pettitte.

"You know," I said in my best offhand tone, "I just went online to, uh, research something and happened to check the Yankees website, and notice that Pettitte's listed as probable for Thursday night."

This was said knowing full well that we were supposed to be heading back up to Port Getaway on Thursday morning.

The Wife was silent a moment.

"What it means," I said, "is that Joe isn't adjusting the rotation for the rainout, and that Andy'll be on the mound tomorrow, and that--"

"I know what it means," The Wife said. And paused. "Do you want to buy tickets for Thursday?"

"Nah, can't, we need to get on the road," I said, already checking the Ticketmaster website for available seats at the game.

"You're sure?" The Wife said.

"Positive, I have to be an adult about this, we'd better leave," I said, closely eyeing my computer screen. There were seats. Good ones, too. But I only had three minutes to buy them or they would be released for other customers. Meaning I had to sound nonchalant while still talking fast. "You know, though, since you did mention it, I've gone on the Ticketmaster site and can see some pretty nice tickets for Thursday-"

"Get 'em." The Wife said.

"You sure?" I said, already typing in my credit card info. "Because I really don't want to be selfish--"

"Quit lying before you lose those tickets," she said.

We all know about Thursday night. The bitter cold, the wind, the snow. You could barely see those Devil Rays whisk around the bases amid the swirling flakes. Unfortunately, they didn't mask the Yankee errors, or the walks, or the wild pitches. Their results showed up clearly on the scoreboard.

The Yanks lost, sure. And sure, Andy had a rough night and got an early hook. But there he was flinging himself at home plate to save a run. And then doing a belly flop on the frosty turf near first while trying to save another.

Randy Johnson never did that kind of stuff when he was on the mound.

Kevin Brown wouldn't have thought about it.

None of those guys who came to the Bronx to help fill the void left by Pettitte would have.

But Andy, coming off back problems, didn't have to think. He just reacted and did it. Because that's the only way he knows how to play the game. Because he embodies what made the Yankees teams of the 90s great, and because he possesses a winning grit and team spirit that neither of those faux aces could even approximate.

And best of all, Andy Pettitte wasn't brought back to rekindle fond memories.

Andy Pettitte can pitch and, by example, make other pitchers in the rotation better.

"Hey, you know what?" said the guy in the seat beside me as we watched the Yanks stumble toward a loss that Thursday night. "We just got to see the best Yankee player come back and the ugliest game ever all in one night."

I laughed. He was a good guy to sit next to.

"Yeah, man," I said. "You got it."

It was a heckuva moment.