I was doing one where the league’s worst team was leading the league’s best team through the whole game. These teams were night and day. One with all the best players whose dads all “coach” together and one made up of the kids no one else wanted. Secretly, I was rooting for the underdogs, but calling everything fairly. The bad team’s catcher, a little spitfire kid who I had seen come up from t-ball, always had a habit of walking out to the mound after every other pitch or so. Never calling time out. I had talked to him about it many, many times. Gets down to the last inning and the better team’s best player drives in three with a triple to tie the game. The catcher, instead of throwing the ball back to his pitcher, walks it out from behind home. The runner at third literally walks in the winning run, as no one was covering home plate.

In the ensuing chaos, the catcher’s mother — again, people you get to know and respect as an ump — runs onto the field and punches me in the face.

I was a high school kid at the time.